
I 



W. H. Smith, Esq., 
The Ferns, 







LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

THE McEWEN COLLECTION 

OF SHAKESPEAREANA 






BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 



AN INQUIRY TOUCHING 

PLAYERS, PLAYHOUSES, AND PLAY-WRITERS 

IN THE DAYS OF ELIZABETH. 



WILLIAM HENRY SMITH, ESQ. 

TO WHICH IS APPENDED AN ABSTEACT OF A MS. RESPECTING 

TOBIE MATTHEW. 
LONDON: 

JOHN RUSSELL SMITH, 
36, SOHO SQUARE. 

M.DCCC.IiVn. 



[^ %! 



^ v 



3 






London : 

P. Pickton, Printer, 

Peeey's Place, 29, Oxfoed Stkeet. 






^Jr.2^,1^1 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter I. — Introduction 1 

II. — A Brief History of Shakespeare 2 

III. — Bacon and Shakespeare 3 

IV. — Wit and Poetic Faculty of Bacon and 

Shakespeare 13 

V. — Bacon's Powers of Mind, in Youth and 

Advanced Years 19 

VL — Evidence in Favour of Shakespeare . . . 25 
VII. — Parallel Passages, and Peculiar Phrases, in 

Bacon and Shakespeare 40 

VIII.— Players 47 

IX.— Playhouses 64 

X.— Play-Writers 79 

XI. — AthencBum and other Objectors answered . . 90 
XII. — Popular Errors respecting Lord Southampton 

and Shakespeare 110 

XIII. — Tate, Kemble, &e. a then- Knowledge of 

Shakespeare 121 

XIV. — An Epitome of what has gone before . . . 143 
Appendix. — A Brief Description of a curious MS., entitled 
A True Historical! Relation of the Con- 
version of Sir Tcbie Zvlatthews . 155 



TO HIS READERS AND REVIEWERS, 



By the Scotch Review, which bears the outward 
semblance of Buchanan, we have been reviled as a 
" Caviller", and a " Smith." The editor might 
have reflected that our names and lineaments we 
inherit, whilst our words and actions are our own. 
If his pages were as full of wisdom as ours are 
free from cavil, the visage without his book, would 
not be regarded as a mask, whose brains we vainly 
seek within : and the Review might yet hope to 
attain a fame coextensive with our name — a name 
which some wise, and many worthy men, have 
borne — which, though not unique, is perfectly gen- 
teel— and which has, of late years, become such a 



VI PREFACE. 

tower of strength that, for it, a King of the French 
was glad to forego his own high-sounding title. 

In our little pamphlet (a letter to Lord Elles- 
mere), it is written — "I purposely abstain from 
any attempt to compare the writings of the author 
I am about to mention, with the Plays which are 
attributed to Shakespeare ; not merely because that 
is a labour too vast to enter upon now, but more 
particularly because it is essentially the province 
of the literary student." 

We did not, and do not, pretend to be equal to 
a literary labour. We merely, to use an expression 
of Bacon's, "have taken upon us to ring a bell, 
to call other wits together, which is the meanest 
office." But as, like unready servants, they stared 
at the bell instead of answering it, we are com- 
pelled to do our own errand, and reluctantly make 
some further entrance into the subject. 



PREFACE, Vll 

Though our faith is sincere, we feel that it wants 
confirmation, and that we are constitutionally more 
fit to form one of a congregation of old believers, 
than to become the preacher of a new creed. 

What Bacon says of his book on the Advance- 
ment of Learning, we may say of our humble pro- 
duction — " In which if I have in any point receded 
from that which is commonly received, it hath been 
with a purpose of proceeding in melius, and not in 
aliud; a mind of amendment and proficiency, and 
not of change and difference. For I could not be 
true and constant to the argument I handle, if I 
were not willing to go beyond others, but yet not 
more willing than to have others go beyond me 
again : which may the better appear by this, that I 
have propounded my opinions naked and unarmed, 
not seeking to preoccupate the liberty of men^s 
judgments by confutations.^ 



Vlll PREFACE. 

And we will conclude by quoting his paper on 
the Pacification of the Church, where he says — 
" Knowing in my conscience, whereto God beareth 
witness, that the things which I shall speak spring 
out of no vein of popularity, ostentation, desire of 
novelty, partiality to either side, disposition to 
intermeddle, or any such leaven : I may conceive 
hope, that what I want in depth of judgment may 
be countervailed in simplicity and sincerity of 
affection/' 

THE AUTHOR. 



BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 



The Author has been advised to 

PREFACE 

the reissue of his Book with the following Letters : 

Mr. Smith to Mr. Hawthorne. 
Sir, 

My attention has been called to the following 
statement in the Literary Gazette of the 9th of 
May. 

" Miss Bacon's book, a volume of imposing di- 
mensions, is introduced by a preface from Mr. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who thus alludes to Mr. 
Smith's appropriation of his countrywoman's la- 
bours : — c An English writer (in a letter to the 
Earl of Ellesmere, published within a few months 
back) has thought it not inconsistent with the fair 
play upon which his country prides itself, to take 
to himself this lady's theory, and favour the public 
with it as his own original conception, without 
allusion to the author's prior claim.' " 



I beg to assure you that I had never heard the 
name of Miss Bacon until it was mentioned in the 
review of my pamphlet in the Literary Gazette, 
Sept. 1856. I had then great difficulty in ascer- 
taining where Miss Bacon had written any thing 
respecting the Shakespeare Plays. Having done so, 
and read the article on " William Shakespeare and 
his Plays/' it seemed to me so preposterous for any 
one to conclude that I had derived my theory from 
thence, that I did not think the insinuation worthy 
of notice. The association of your name, however, 
gives the statement an importance and respectabi- 
lity which the former insinuation in the Literary 
Gazette did not possess, and therefore, although 
as a "writer" indifferent to fame, as a "man" I 
cannot allow such a calumny to pass unnoticed. 

If it were necessary T could show, that for up- 
wards of twenty years I have held the opinion that 
Bacon was the author of the Shakespeare Plays, 
but I trust that what I have written will be suf- 
ficient to induce you to withdraw the offensive 
imputation. 

Waiting your reply, 

I remain Sir, your obedient Servant, 

William Henry Smith. 



Mr- Hawthorne s Reply. 

Sir, Liverpool, June 5th, 185 7< 

In response to your note of 2nd instant, I beg 
leave to say that I entirely accept your statement 
as to the originality and early date of your own 
convictions regarding the authorship of the Shake- 
speare Plays, and likewise as to your ignorance oi 
Miss Bacon's prior publication on the subject. Of 
course, my imputation of unfairness or discourtesy 
on your part falls at once to the ground, and I 
regret that it was ever made. 

My mistake was perhaps a natural one, although 
unquestionably the treatment of the subject in 
your Letter to the Earl of Ellesmere differs widely 
from that adopted by Miss Bacon. But as I knew 
that a rumour of her theory had been widely, though 
vaguely circulated, for some years past, on both sides 
of the Atlantic, and also that she had preceded you 
in publication, it really never occurred to me tc 
doubt that, at least, some wandering seed had 
alighted in your mind, and germinated into your 
pamphlet. Under urgent circumstances, I had 
taken upon myself to write a few prefatory and 
explanatory words for my countrywoman's book. 
It was impossible to avoid some allusion to your 



pamphlet ; and I made such reference as seemed 
due to an attempt to take an easy advantage of a 
discovery (allowing it to be such) on which Miss 
Bacon had staked the labour and happiness of her 
life, and to develop which she had elaborated a 
very remarkable work. 

I now see that my remarks did you great in- 
justice, and I trust that you will receive this ac- 
knowledgment as the only reparation in my power. 

Respectfully, Sir, 

Your obedient Servant, 

Nathaniel Hawthorne. 



CHAPTER I. 
INTRODUCTION. 

Sir Francis Bacon notes, amongst the impedi- 
ments of knowledge, that 

" He that delivereth knowledge, desireth to de- 
liver it in such form as may be soonest believed, 
and not as may easiliest be examined. 

<c He that receiveth knowledge, desireth rather 
present satisfaction than expectant search, and so 
rather not to doubt, than not to err. 

" Glory maketh the author not to lay open his 
weakness, and sloth maketh the disciple not to 
know his strength." 



CHAPTER II. 
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SHAKESPEARE. 

William Shakespeare's is indeed a negative 
history. 

Of his life, all that we positively know is the 
period of his death. 

We do not know w r hen he was born, nor when, 
nor w r here, he was educated. 

We do not know when, or where, he was mar- 
ried, nor when he came to London. 

We do not know when, where, or in what order, 
his plays were written or performed ; nor when he 
left London. 

He died April 23rd, 1616. 



CHAPTER III. 

BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

Towards the end of the sixteenth, and at the 
beginning of the seventeenth century, that is, 
prior to the year 1611, a number of plays, tra- 
gedies, comedies, and histories, of various degrees 
of merit, were produced, of which William Shake- 
speare was reported to be the author, and which 
undoubtedly were, in some way, the property of 
the company of actors of which he was an active 
member. 

No one single manuscript has ever been found 
to identify Shakespeare as the author of these 
productions; nor is there, among all the records 
and traditions handed down to us, any statement 
that he was ever seen writing or producing a manu- 
script ; nor that he ever claimed as his own any of 
the excellent, or repudiated (as unworthy of him) 
any of the worthless; productions presented to the 
public in his name. 



4 BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

He seems, at no time, to have had any personal 
or peculiar interest in them ; both during and after 
his life, they appear to have been the property of 
the stage, and " published by the players, doubt- 
less according to their notions of acceptability with 
the visitants of the theatre." No Plays bearing 
Shakespeare's name, were published between the 
years 1609 and 1622; but in the year 1623 (seven 
years after Shakespeare's death) a folio of thirty- 
six plays was brought out as " The Workes of Mr. 
William Shakespeare." 

Of the numerous plays which had appeared and 
been considered his during his life, thirteen only 
were admitted into this folio, the rest being entirely 
ignored ; but twenty-three other plays were added, 
none of which had ever previously been published. 

This volume contains what we now recognise as 
"Shakespeare's Plays" — works of which it has 
been said by competent judges, that "they are, 
beyond comparison, the greatest productions which 
man's intellect, not divinely inspired, has yet 
achieved." 

That the works now admitted into our editions 
are all the productions of the same mind, no one 
at the present day, dreams of disputing; but if 
they had descended to us without any tradition as 



BACON AXD SHAKESPEARE. O 

to the name of the author, and our only informa- 
tion respecting them had been an exact knowledge 
of the period at which they were written, that 
we should in that case have attributed them to 
William Shakespeare, is in the highest degree 
doubtful. 

To consider the probability of these plays having 
been written by William Shakespeare, and to attack 
the evidence by which the assertion that they were 
is supported, is our present object. 

Proof that they were written by some other 
person, we do not yet hope to be able to adduce, 
but merely such evidence of the probability of this 
being the case, as may induce some active inquiry 
in the direction indicated. 

To acquaint ourselves with the qualifications 
which Shakespeare must have possessed to have 
enabled him to write these plays, we propose to 
quote the observations of Pope and Coleridge; 
then to give a brief outline of the lives of Shake- 
speare and Bacon ; and then to note some of the 
peculiarities of the genius of Bacon. 

To begin then with Pope, he says: — "If ever 
an author deserved the name of an original it was 
Shakespeare. The poetry of Shakespeare was 
inspiration indeed \ he is not so much an imitator 



& BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

as an instrument of Nature ; and -'tis not so just 
to say, that he speaks from her as that she speaks 
through him. His characters are so much Nature 
herself, that 'tis a sort of injury to call them by so 
distant a name as copies of her. The power over 
our passions was never possessed in a more emi- 
nent degree, or displayed in so different instances ; 
yet all along, there is no labour, no pains to raise 
them, no preparation to guide our guess to the 
effect, or to be perceived to lead towards it ; but 
the heart swells, and the tears burst out just at the 
proper places. We are surprised the moment we 
weep, and yet, upon reflection, find the passion so 
just, that we should be surprised if we had not 
wept, and wept at that very moment.* The pas- 
sions directly opposite to these are no less at his 
command. Nor does he only excel in the passions : 
in the coolness of reflection and reasoning he is 
full as admirable. His sentiments are not only 
in general the most pertinent and judicious upon 
every subject ; but by a talent very peculiar, some- 
thing between penetration and felicity, he hits 

* Of Bacon, Jonson says in his Discoveries — " His language 
(when he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. 
He commanded when he spoke, and had his judges, angry and 
pleased, at his devotion. No man had their affections more in 
his power. 



BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 7 

upon that particular point on which the bent of 
each argument turns, or the force of each motive 
depends. This is perfectly amazing from a man 
of no education or experience in those great and 
public scenes of life which are usually the subject 
of his thoughts. So that he seems to have known 
the world by intuition, to have looked through 
human nature at one glance, and to be the only 
author that gives ground for a very new opinion 
— that the philosopher and even the man of the 
world may be born, as well as the poet." 

With regard to his learning, Pope says: — " There 
is certainly a vast difference between learning and 
languages. How far he was ignorant of the latter 
I cannot determine ; but 'tis plain he had much 
reading, at least, if they will not call it learning. 
Nor is it any great matter, if a man has knowledge, 
whether he has it from one language or another. 
Nothing is more evident than that he had a taste 
of natural history, mechanics, ancient and modern 
history, poetical learning, and mythology. We find 
him very knowing in the customs, rites, and man- 
ners of antiquity. In Coriolamis and Julius Ccesar, 
not only the spirit but manners of the Romans 
are exactly drawn ; and still a nicer distinction is 
shown between the manners of the Romans in the 



8 BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

time of the former and of the latter. The manners 
of other nations in general, the Egyptians, Vene- 
tians, French, &c, are drawn with equal propriety. 
Whatever object of nature or branch of science he 
either speaks of or describes, it is always with 
competent, if not extensive knowledge : his de- 
scriptions are still exact, all his metaphors appro- 
priated, and remarkably drawn from the true nature 
and inherent qualities of each subject. When he 
treats of ethics or politics, we may constantly 
observe a wonderful justness of distinction, as well 
as extent of comprehension. No one is more a 
master of the poetical story, or has more frequent 
allusions to the various parts of it. Mr. Waller 
(who has been celebrated for this last particular) 
has not shown more learning this way than Shake- 
speare. We have translations from Ovid, published 
in his name, among those poems which pass for 
his. He appears also to have been conversant in 
Plautus, from whom he has taken the plot of one 
of his plays; he follows the Greek authors, and 
particularly Dares Phrygius, in another (although 
I will not pretend to say in what language he read 
them) . The modern Italian writers of novels he 
was manifestly acquainted with; and we may 
conclude him to be no less conversant with the 



BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 9 

ancients of his own country, from the use he has 
made of Chaucer in Troilus and Cressida, and in 
the Two Noble Kinsmen, if that play be his, as 
there goes a tradition it was.-" 

We will now give a short extract from 
Coleridge : — 

" O, when I think of the inexhaustible mine of 
virgin wealth in our Shakespeare; that I have 
been almost daily reading him since I was ten 
years old ; that the thirty intervening years have 
been unintermittingly and not fruitlessly employed 
in the study of the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, 
Spanish, and German belle lettrists — the last fifteen 
years, in addition, still more intensely, in the ana- 
lysis of the laws of life and reason, as they exist in 
man ; and that upon every step I have made for- 
ward — in taste, in acquisition of facts from history 
or my own observation — in knowledge of the dif- 
ferent laws of being and their apparent exceptions 
from accidental collision of disturbing forces — 
that, at every new accession of information, after 
every successful exercise of meditation, and every 
fresh presentation of experience — I have unfailingly 
discovered a proportionate increase of wisdom and 
intuition in Shakespeare." 

We propose now to consider the history — the 



10 BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

brief and admitted history of the man, to -whom 
the genius of Pope and the intellect of Coleridge 
offer this homage. 

There is reason to suppose that Shakespeare 
was born in the year 1564. His father was a 
humble tradesman at Stratford-upon-Avon, who at 
one time had so much improved his position as to 
attain to the office of bailiff of the borough. He 
afterwards, however, became very much reduced 
in circumstances. Any education that William 
Shakespeare received, he most probably obtained 
at the free school at Stratford ; that it was very 
superficial, is now generally admitted. At about 
the age of eighteen, he contracted or was inveigled 
into a marriage with a woman eight years older 
than himself; and about the year 1586, when he 
was twenty-two years old, he left his wife and 
family at Stratford, and came to London; and 
very shortly afterwards was actively engaged in 
the management of a theatre, and continued to be 
so until about the year 1611, when, having made 
a considerable fortune, he retired to Stratford- 
upon-Avon, to enjoy the fruits of his active in- 
dustry, and died there in 1616. 

Francis Bacon was born in 1561. His father 
was the famous Sir Nicholas, so many years Lord 



BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 11 

Keeper. His mother was a very learned woman. 
Francis Bacon was carefully brought up at home 
until he was twelve years old. He then went to 
Cambridge, and had completed his studies by the 
time he was sixteen years old. 

In 1576 he went abroad; and upon the death 
of his father in 1579, returned to England; and, 
finding himself in straitened circumstances, un- 
willingly took to the study of the law, and became 
a member of Gray's Inn. 

He seems to have had but little practice as a 
barrister, and to have vainly solicited for Govern- 
ment employment, and been in embarrassed cir- 
cumstances during the whole of Queen Elizabeth's 
reign. "With the accession of James in 1603, his 
prospects improved ; he was appointed Solicitor- 
General in 1607, and rapidly rose, until eventually 
he became Lord Chancellor, from which office he 
was removed, with disgrace, in 1621, and died in 
1626. 

The object in stating these biographies is, to 
show how identical were the periods in which these 
two men flourished. If Shakespeare wrote these 
plays, he most probably did so between the years 
1586 and 1611; if Bacon wrote them, he most 
probably did so between the years 1580 and 1607. 



12 BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

Having stated what Pope and Coleridge predicate 
of the qualifications of the author of these plays, 
we should hardly expect to recognise in a person, 
bom and brought up as we have represented 
Shakespeare to have been, the probable possessor 
of such vast and varied acquirements. 



CHAPTER IY. 

WIT AND POETIC FACULTY OF BACON 
AND SHAKESPEARE, 

In the following extracts from that able essayist 
Mr. Macaulay, anatomising and describing the 
genius and character of Bacon, the reader will 
recognise peculiarities bearing a strong affinity to 
those which characterise these plays. The extent 
and variety of Bacon's knowledge are so well 
known and universally admitted, that it is unne- 
cessary to dwell upon that point, though the beau- 
tiful language and imagery with which Mr. 
Macaulay has illustrated it, might well excuse a 
quotation. 

Of his wit he says : — " In wit, if by wit be meant 
the power of perceiving analogies between things 
which appear to have nothing in common, he never 
had an equal; not even Cowley — not even the 
author of Hudibras. Indeed he possessed this fa- 
culty, or rather it possessed him, to a morbid degree. 



14 WIT AND POETIC FACULTY OF 

When he abandoned himself to it without reserve, 
the feats which he performed were not only ad- 
mirable, but portentous and almost shocking. On 
those occasions we marvel at him as clowns on a 
fair-day marvel at a juggler, and can hardly help 
thinking the devil must be in him. These, how- 
ever, were feats in which his ingenuity now and 
then wandered, with scarcely any other object 
than to astonish and amuse. But it occasionally 
happened, that when he was engaged in grave and 
profound investigations, his wit obtained the mas- 
tery over all his other faculties, and led him into 
absurdities, into which no dull man could possibly 
have fallen." After giving several instances, Mr. 
Macaulay proceeds thus : — " The truth is, his mind 
was wonderfully quick in perceiving analogies of 
all sorts. But, like several eminent men whom we 
could name, both living and dead, he sometimes 
appeared strangely deficient in the power of dis- 
tinguishing rational from fanciful analogies — ana- 
logies which are arguments, from analogies which 
are mere illustrations." 

After showing how this want of discrimination 
has led to many strange political speculations, Mr. 
Macaulay proceeds : — 

" It is curious that Bacon has mentioned this 



BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 15 

very kind of delusion among the idola specus, and 
has mentioned it in language which, we are inclined 
to think, shows that he knew himself to be subject 
to it. It is the vice, he tells us, of subtle minds to 
attach too much importance to slight distinctions ; 
it is the vice, on the other hand, of high and dis- 
cursive intellects to attach too much importance to 
slight resemblances • and he adds, that when this 
last propensity is indulged to excess, it leads men 
to catch at shadows instead of substances. Yet 
we cannot wish that Bacon's wit had been less 
luxuriant; for, to say nothing of the pleasure it 
affords, it was in the vast majority of cases em- 
ployed for the purpose of making obscure truth 
plain, of making repulsive truth attractive, of 
fixing in the mind for ever, truth which might 
otherwise have left but a transient impression.^ 

To show the identity of this wit with that exhi- 
bited in the plays attributed to Shakespeare, we 
here insert the observations of M. Guizot upon 
Shakespeare * : — 

" The poet's (Shakespeare's) gaze embraced an 
immense field, and his imagination, traversing it 
with marvellous rapidity, perceived a thousand dis- 
tant and singular relations between the objects 

* Guizot' s Shakespeare and Ms Times^ page 115. 



16 WIT AND POETIC FACULTY OF 

which met his view, and passed from one to ano- 
ther by a multitude of abrupt and curious transi- 
tions, which it afterwards imposed upon both the 
personages of the drama and the spectators. Hence 
arose the true and great fault of Shakespeare, the 
only one which originated in himself, and which is 
sometimes perceptible, even in his finest composi- 
tions, and that is a defective appearance of labo- 
rious research, which is occasioned, on the con- 
trary, by the absence of labour. Accustomed by 
the tasts of his age, frequently to connect ideas 
and expressions by their most distant relations, he 
contracted the habit of that learned subtlety which 
perceives and assimilates everything, and leaves no 
point of resemblance unnoticed." 

Of Bacon's poetical faculty, Mr. Macaulay ob- 
serves : — 

" The poetical faculty was powerful in Bacon's 
mind j but not, like his wit, so powerful as occa- 
sionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to 
tyrannise over the whole man. No imagination 
was ever at once so strong and so throughly sub- 
jugated. It never stirred but at a signal from 
good sense ; it stopped at the first check of good 
sense. Yet, though disciplined to such obedience, 
it gave noble proofs of its vigour ; in truth, much 



BACON AXD SHAKESPEARE. 17 

of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world. 
He loved to picture to himself the world as it 
would be, when his philosophy should, in his own 
noble phrase, c have enlarged the bounds of human 
empire. ; 

" We might refer to many instances, but we will 
content ourselves with the strongest — the descrip- 
tion of the house of Solomon in the Neiv Atlantis. 
By most of Bacon's contemporaries, and by some 
people of our time, this remarkable passage would, 
we doubt not, be considered as an ingenious rodo- 
montade, a counterpart of the adventures of Sinbad 
or Baron Munchausen. The truth is, that there is 
not to be found in any human composition, a pas- 
sage more eminently distinguished by profound and 
serene wisdom. The boldness and originality of 
the fiction are far less wonderful than the nice dis- 
cernment which carefully excluded from that long 
list of prodigies, everything that can be proved to 
lie beyond the mighty magic of induction and of 
time. Already some parts, and not the least stare- 
ling parts, of this glorious prophecy have beer: 
accomplished, even according to the letter: and 
the whole, construed according to the spirit, is 
daily accomplishing all around us/' 

Now, this is precisely that which we find in 

2 



18 WIT AND POETIC FACULTY, ETC. 

the plays under our consideration. As Schlegel 
observes: — "This Prometheus not merely forms 
men — he opens the gates of the magical world of 
spirits, calls up the midnight ghost, exhibits before 
us the witches with their unhallowed rites, peoples 
the air with sportive fairies and sylphs ; and these 
beings, though existing only in the imagination, 
nevertheless possess such truth and consistency, 
that, even with such misshapen abortions as Cali- 
ban, he extorts the assenting conviction, that, ivere 
there such beings, they ivould so conduct themselves. 
In a word, as he carries a bold and pregnant fancy 
into the kingdom of nature, on the other hand, he 
carries nature into the regions of fancy, which lie 
beyond the confines of reality. We are lost in 
astonishment at the close intimacy he brings us 
into with the extraordinary, the wonderful, and the 
unheard of." 

Thus we see that Bacon and Shakespeare both 
flourished at the same time, and might, either of 
them, have written these works, as far as dates are 
concerned, and that Bacon not only had the requi- 
site learning and experience, but also that his wit 
and poetic faculty were exactly of that peculiar 
character which we find exhibited in these plays. 



CHAPTER Y. 

BACON'S POWERS OF MIND, IN YOUTH 
AND ADVANCED YEAES. 

One of the most remarkable circumstances, says 
Macaulay, in the history of Bacon's mind, is the 
order in which its powers expanded themselves. 
With him the fruit came first, and remained till 
the last ; the blossoms did not appear till late. In 
general, the development of the fancy is to the 
development of the judgment, what the growth of 
a girl is to the growth of a boy. The fancy attains 
at an early period to the perfection of its beauty, 
its power, and its fruitfulness ; and as it is first to 
ripen, it is also first to fade. It has generally lost 
something of its bloom and freshness before the 
sterner qualities have reached maturity, and is 
commonly withered and barren, whilst those facul- 
ties still retain all their enegies. It rarely happens 
that the fancy and the judgment grow together. 
It happens still more rarely, that the judgment 
grows faster than the fancy ; this seems, however, 
to have been the case with Bacon. His bovhood 



20 bacon's powers of mtnd, 

and youth seem to have been singularly sedate. 
His gigantic scheme of philosophical reform, is 
said by some writers, to have been planned before 
he was fifteen, and was undoubtedly planned while 
he was still young. He observed as vigilantly, me- 
ditated as deeply, and judged as temperately, when 
he gave his first work to the world, as at the close 
of his long career. 

But in eloquence, in sweetness and variety of 
expression, and in richness of illustration, his later 
writings are far superior to those of his youth. We 
will give very short specimens of Bacon's two styles. 
In 1597, he wrote thus : — " Crafty men condemn 
studies ; simple men admire them ; and wise men 
use them : for they teach not their own use, that 
is a wisdom without them, and won by observation. 
Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to 
weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, 
others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed 
and digested. Beading maketh a full man, con- 
ference a ready man, and writing a correct man. 
And therefore, if a man write little, he had need of 
a great memory ; if he confer little, have present 
wit; and if he read little, have much cunning, to 
seem to know that he doth not. Histories make 
wise men ; poets, witty ; mathematicians, subtle ; 



IN YOUTH AND ADYxVNCED YEARS. 21 

natural philosophy, deep ; morals, grave ; logic and 
rhetoric, able to contend."" 

The following passage, first published in 1625, 
will show the extent of the change : — 

" Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testa- 
ment ; adversity is the blessing of the New, which 
carrieth the greater benediction, and the clearer 
evidence of God's favour. Yet even in the Old 
Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you will 
hear as many hearse-like airs as carols \ and the 
pencil of the Holy Ghost hath laboured more in 
describing the afflictions of Job, than the felicities 
of Solomon. Prosperity is not without many fears 
and distates, and adversity is not without comforts 
and hopes. We see in needleworks and embroide- 
ries, it is more pleasing to have a lively work on a 
sad and solemn ground, than to have a dark and 
melancholy work upon a lightsome ground. Judge 
therefore of the pleasures of the heart by the plea- 
sure of the eye. Certainly virtue is like precious 
odours, most fragrant when they are incensed or 
crushed • for prosperity doth best discover vice, and 
adversity doth best discover virtue/' 

The phenomenon which Mr. Macaulay remarks 
upon is so peculiar, that it is clear that he can 
hardly believe it himself. This seems, says he, to 



22 bacon's powers of mind, 

have been the case with Bacon. That the fruit 
should come first and remain till the last, and the 
blossom not appear till late, is so contrary to na- 
ture, that we may well pause and inquire whether 
this was really the case, or did but seem to be so. 

Upon the orange- tree we may observe the bud, 
the blossom, and the fruit in every stage of ripeness, 
all exhibited in one plant at the same time, although 
each individually has, in its production, observed the 
exact order prescribed by nature. But when the 
plant is in this state, what hinders that the gardener 
should not gather fruit and flower at the same time, 
and appropriate each to its several use? And how 
diverse and remote may their several uses be ! 

The stentorian orator in the City Forum, who, 
restoring his voice with the luscious fruit, conti- 
nues his harangue to the applauding multitude,little 
reflects, that the delicate blossom which grew by 
its side, and was gathered at the same time, de- 
corates the fair brow of the fainting bride in the 
far-off village church. Nature is always true to 
herself: her order was not reversed in the case of 
Bacon. The bud, the blossom, the flower, and the 
fruit, each came in its proper and accustomed 
order, and grew and flourished long together. But 
what if, like a prudent husbandman, he sent each 



IN YOUTH AND ADVANCED TEARS. 23 

to its appropriate market — the Sowers of his fancy. 
to the wits and the players ; the fruits of his iuds- 
rnent, to the sages and statesmen of his day ? This 
peculiarity; remarked upon by Mr. jlacaulay, tends 
greatly to confirm the probability of the theory we 
are advocating. The theatre seems to have been 
a necessity of Bacon's spiritual existence, as afford- 
ing a safety-valve by which he was able to let ofi 
the superfluous wit, which would otherwise, doubt- 
less, have exploded in a manner totally destructive 
to the reputation, which at that early period of his 
life he was endeavouring to build up. 

We attribute, then, the gravity of Bacon'' s early 
style, to the nature of his position and the charac- 
ter of the age. The times of Elizabeth and James 
are often mentioned together, as though they were 
identical, yet few proximate periods are more dis- 
similar. The gloomy fanaticism of the Common- 
wealth was scarcely more opposed to the gay licen- 
tiousness of the Restoration, than the wisdom and 
discretion of the days of Elizabeth to the pedantry 
and folly of those of James. 

In the former, learned men studied only how 
best to employ their learning ; in the latter, men 
equally learned, studied only how best to display 
it. Events were so stirring in the davs of Eliza- 



24 bacon's powers of mind, etc. 

beth, that to those engaged in the business of the 
state, feigned catastrophes might well seem imper- 
tinent, and poetry be for the time disregarded. 
The commoner sort of people doubtless had a keen 
appreciation of it, and wise rulers have ever paid 
some attention to popular feeling ; hence the tole- 
ration of professed actors and a public playhouse. 

But the writing of plays, as the acting of them, 
was considered by the better sort " a toy," which 
might be practised as a pastime and recreation, 
but which conferred neither honour nor distinction 
upon the maker or performer. 

In that age, as Coleridge truly observes, the law, 
the church, and the state, engrossed all honour and 
respectability ; a degree of disgrace — levior qucedam 
infamice macula — was attached to the publication 
of poetry, and even to have sported with the muse 
as a private relaxation, was supposed to be, a venial 
fault indeed, but something beneath the gravity Ox 
a wise man. The professed writers for the stage in 
the days of Elizabeth,were all men of talent, most 
of them members of the universities, and some 
clergymen; but, with hardly an exception, they 
were men of licentious lives, depraved habits, and 
ruined characters — pests of society, shunned by all 
the respectable portion of the community. 



CHAPTER U 

EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR OF 
SHAKESPEARE. 

The main evidence in favour of Shakespeare having 
been the author of these plays, is — 

The fact of his name always having been attached 
to and associated with them. 

Mere's mention of him in Wifs Commonwealth. 

Basse's elegy the only one supposed to have been 
written near the time of his decease. 

The passage in the Return from Parnassus. 

Ben Jonson's testimony in his Discoveries, and 
his verses published with the folio of 1623. 

All the other testimonies are subsequent to the 
publication of the collection of plays, and have 
reference to them, and not to the individual man, 
or else are worthless traditions, which, whether true 
or false, would serve as incidents to eke out a life or 
biography, but do nothing towards elucidating the 
authorship of the plays. Hallam observes, "I laud 
the labours of Mr. Collier, Mr. Hunter, and other 



26 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR 

collectors of such crumbs, though I am not sure 
that we should not venerate Shakespeare as much 
if they had left him undisturbed in his obscurity. 
To be told that he played a trick to a brother 
player in a licentious amour, or that he died of a 
drunken frolic, as a stupid vicar of Stratford re- 
counts (long after the time) in his diary, does not 
exactly inform us of the man who wrote Lear, 
If there was a Shakespeare of earth (as I suspect) , 
there was also one of heaven ; and it is of him we 
desire to know something." — 1842. 

In fact, every accession of information we obtain 
respecting the man Shakespeare, renders it more 
and more difficult to detect in him the poet. 

The evidence of Ben Jonson is so much more di- 
rect than any to be derived from any other source, 
that, as we intend to impugn it, we do not esteem 
it necessary to grapple with the others. 

In his Discoveries Jonson writes: — "I remember 
the players have often mentioned it as an honour 
to Shakespeare, that in his writings (whatsoever 
he penned) he never blotted out a line. My 
answer hath been, Would he had blotted a thou- 
sand ! which they thought a malevolent speech. 
I had not told posterity this but for their igno- 
rance, who chose that circumstance to commend 



OF SHAKESPEARE. Zi 

their friend by, wherein he most faulted, and to 
justify my own candour; for I loved the man, and 
do honour his memory on this side idolatry, as 
much as any. He was (indeed) honest, and of an 
open and free nature ; had an excellent phantasy, 
brave notions, and gentle expressions ; wherein he 
flowed with that facility that sometimes it was 
necessary that he should be stopped : Suffiami- 
nandus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His 
wit was in his own power; would the rule of it had 
been so to. Many times he fell into those things 
could not escape laughter : as when he said, in the 
person of Caesar , one speaking to him, c Caesar, thou 
dost me wrong/ he replied, 'Caesar did never 
wrong but with just cause / and such like, which 
were ridiculous. But he redeemed his vices with 
his virtues. There was ever more in him to be 
praised than to be pardoned." 

The edition of Jonson's works, published in 1616, 
— a rare folio — does not contain the Discoveries : 
they were first published in 1640, three years after 
Jonson's death. The Discoveries are detached 
thoughts and reflections, which appear to have 
been dotted down or entered in a commonplace 
book, without much regard to order, sequence, or 
priority. It is hardly possible to imagine any man, 



28 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR 

who had read the collected plays of Shakespeare, 
writing such a description of him as herein con- 
tained, or, in the face of such evidence misquoting 
a passage from one of these plays. The probability 
is, that Jonson wrote this passage prior to 1623, 
very likely soon after Shakespeare's death, and be- 
fore he became so intimately acquainted with these 
plays, as we shall presently endeavour to show that 
he ultimately was. Pope surmises that his re- 
mark on Julius Ccesar was made " upon no better 
credit than some blunder of an actor in speaking 
the verse." This doubtless was the fact; and 
Jonson, having noted it down, and neglected to 
destroy or expunge it, his executors found it after 
his death, and published it with his other writings, 
thus perpetuating a blunder which reflects ridicule, 
not upon Shakespeare, but upon Jonson himself. 
As we cannot believe that Jonson retained this 
opinion after the publication of the folio, or would 
have wished such a comment on Julius Ccesar to 
have been published, so we may fairly infer that 
his judgment with regard to Shakespeare would in 
other respects also have been greatly changed. 

This paragraph, therefore, has not the weight 
and importance which at first sight it would seem 
to possess. 



OF SHAKESPEARE. 29 

Shakespeare's fame — the fame which he now and 
ever will enjoy — is based upon the folio of 1623. 
At its publication, it was ushered into the world 
accompanied by verses written by Ben Jonson, and 
Malone satisfactorily shows that the dedication and 
preface, ascribed to Heminge and Condell, were also 
most likely from his pen ; in fact, it probably would 
not be too much to say, that Ben Jonson was the 
Editor of the Folio of 1623. 

Now, at this time Ben Jonson was at the zenith 
of his fame, and on terms of intimacy with Lord 
Bacon, and perhaps the most competent living 
judge and discriminator of the works of his various 
contemporaries. If then the lines which he wrote, 
and which accompany this volume, celebrate and 
identify the William Shakespeare who died in 
1616 as the author of the plays therein written, 
that evidence ought to be conclusive. The lines 
are in many parts incomprehensible, and through- 
out exhibit a mysterious vagueness quite at vari- 
ance with the general character of Ben Jonson's 
laudatory verses. The critic who would translate 
them into plain prose, would not be ill employed ; 
but, as Bacon observes, with commentators, "it is 
ever usual to blanche the obscure places and dis- 
course upon the plain." 



30 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR 

TO THE HEADER, 

This Figure, that thou here seest put, 

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; 

Wherein the graver had a strife 

with Nature, to out-doo the life : 

O, could he but have drawn his wit 

As well in brasse, as he hath hit 

His face ; the Print would then surpasse 

All, that was ever writ in brasse. 

But, since he cannot, Header, looke 

Not on his Picture, but his Booke. B. I. 

To the Memory of my heloved, the Author, Me. William 
Shakespeake : and what he hath left us. 
To draw no envy (Shakespeare) on thy name, 

Am I thus ample to thy Booke, and Fame : 
While I confesse thy writings to be such, 

As neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much. 
l Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these waves 

Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise : 
For seeliest Ignorance on these may light, 

Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right ; 
Or blinde Affection, which doth ne're advance 

The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance ; 
Or crafty Malice, might pretend this praise, 

And thinke to ruine, where it seem'd to raise. 
These are, as some infamous Baud, or Whore, 

Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more ? 
But thou art proofe against them, and indeed 

Above th' ill fortune of them, or the need. 
I, therefore will begin. Soule of the Agel 

The applause ! delight ! the wonder of our Stage! 
My Shakespeare, rise ; I will not lodge thee by 

Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye 
A little further, to make thee a roome : 

Thou art a Moniment, without a Tombe, 
And art alive still, while thy Booke doth live, 



OF SHAKESPEARE. 31 

And we have wits to read, and praise to give. 
That I not rnixe thee so, my braine excuses ; 

I nieane with great, but disproportion' d Muses : 
For, if I thought my judgement were of yeeres, 

I should commit thee surely with thy peeres, 
And tell, how farre thou didst our Lily out-shine, 

Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line. 
And though thou hadst small Latine, and lesse Greeke, 

From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke 
For names ; but call forth thund'ring iEschilus, 

Euripides, and Sophocles to us, 
Paccuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, 

To life againe, to heare thy Buskin tread, 
And shake a Stage : Or, when thy Sockes were on, 

Leave thee alone, for the comparison 
Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome 

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 
Triumph, my Britaine, thou hast one to sliowe, 

To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. 
He was not of an age, but for all time ! 

And all the Muses still were in their prime, 
When like Apollo he came forth to warme 

Our eares, or like a Mercury to charme ! 
Nature her selfe was proud of his designes, 

And joy'd to weare the dressing of his lines ! 
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, 

As, since, she will vouchsafe no other Wit. 
The merry Greeke, tart Aristophanes, 

Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please ; 
But antiquated, and deserted lye 

As they were not of Nature's family. 
Yet must I not give Nature all : Thy Art, 

My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. 
For though the Poet's matter, Nature be, 

His Art doth give the fashion. And, that he, 
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, 

(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat 



32 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR 

Upon the Muses' anvile : turne the same, 

(And himselfe with it) that he thinkes to frame : 
Or for the lawrell, he may gaine a scorne, 

For a good Poet's made, as well as borne. 
And such wert thou. Looke how the father's face 

Lives in his issue, even so the race 
Of Shakespeare's minde, and manners brightly shines 

In his well-turned, and true-filed lines : 
In each of which, he seems to shake a Lance, 

As brandish' t at the eyes of Ignorance. 
Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were 

To see thee in our waters yet appeare, 
And make those nights upon the bankes of Thames, 

That so did take Eliza, and our James ! 
But stay, I see thee in the Hemisphere 

Advanc'd, and made a Constellation there ! 
Shine forth, thou Starre of Poets, and with rage, 

Or influence, chide or cheere the drooping Stage ; 
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd like night 

And despaires day, but for thy Volume's light. 

Ben Ionson. 

These lines appear to be capable of a double 
meaning. We do not at all mean to contend that 
they in any way prove that Bacon was the author 
of these plays, but only that they do not afford 
that direct evidence in favour of Shakespeare 
which might be expected ; and that some of the 
expressions are clearly susceptible of being applied 
to Bacon. 

Not to dilate upon the exordium, the early lines 
of which appear to express something of an excuse 
for praising the book rather than the individual, 



OF SHAKESPEARE. 33 

we proceed at once to the invocation. That we 
may not be charged with anything like special 
pleading, or a desire to deceive, we admit that the 
lines and phrases selected will be such as seem 
best to favour the theory we are advocating. 

Soul of the age ! 
Th' applause, delight ! the wonder of our age, 
My Shakespeare — rise ! 

tc Soul of the age '* seems a term more appli- 
cable to Bacon than to Shakespeare; whilst the 
possessive pronoun " my/' added to Shakespeare, 
may serve to render his invocation applicable to 
either the one or the other. 

The lines, 

Thou art a monument without a tomb, 
And art alive still while thy book doth live, 
And we have wits to read, and praise to give, 

seem much more applicable to a living than to a 
deceased person. 

And though thou hast small Latin and less Greek, 
From thence to honour thee I would not seek 
For names. 

The first of these lines has been wrested in every 
possible way, to make it applicable to William 
Shakespeare, without success ; and though at first 
sight it might seem even less applicable to Bacon, 

3 



34 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR 

upon investigation the reverse will be found to be 
the case. 

There is reason to suppose that Bacon was not 
greatly proficient in the Greek language, but that 
he was well acquainted with Latin there can be 
no doubt : he probably could speak it with fluency. 
But in that age, when, as has been well observed, 
Latin occupied the place which French now oc- 
cupies, and every one who was educated at all, 
must, of necessity, have been classically educated, 
a man might have a very considerable knowledge 
of Latin and Greek, and yet be pronounced by 
so finished and critical a scholar as Ben Jonson 
undoubtedly w r as, to have " small Latin and less 
Greek. " The observation, and the mode of intro- 
ducing it in the midst of a panygeric, are highly 
characteristic of Jonson ; and it is just such a hit 
as he would delight to bestow upon a living great 
man, whom he considered his inferior in scholar- 
ship. That there is some truth in it, is confirmed 
by contemporary statements ; for in Bacon's life 
in the BiograpMa Britannica, there is this note : 
— " Amelot, in his Memoires Historiques, torn. i. 
page 361, has asserted, upon the pretended autho- 
rity of Casaubon, that Lord Bacon did not under- 
stand Latin. This is as evident a falsehood as 



OF SHAKESPEARE. 35 

any which is to be met with in Amelot's whole 
book. If there be any truth in Casaubon having 
said that Bacon did not understand Latin, he must 
have meant that he did not understand it critically, 
as he himself did." This admission is all that we 
require. We do not undertake to prove that 
Bacon had u small Latin and less Greek/' but 
simply to suggest, that these lines might possibly 
refer to him. Shaw, in his Outlines of General 
Literature, says of Bacon : — " The Latin style is in 
the highest degree, concise, vigorous, and accurate, 
though by no means free from obscurity, and, of 
course, in no way to be considered as a model of 
pure Latinity." Macaulay and others speak of 
Bacon's "crampt Latin." 

Or when thy socks were on, 
Leave thee alone for the comparison 
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 

Ben Jonson, in his Discoveries, uses these very 
words in reference to Bacon. Writing of the 
able men of his day, he says : — " Sir Henry Saville, 
grave and truly lettered; Sir Edwin Sandys, ex- 
cellent in both • Lord Egerton, a grave and great 
orator, and best when he was provoked. But his 
learned and able (but unfortunate) successor, is he 
that hath filled up all numbers, and performed that 



36 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR 

in our tongue, which may be compared and pre- 
ferred to insolent Greece and haughty Rome." 

Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn, 
For a good poet's made, as well as born ; 
And such wert thou. 

These lines are little applicable to Shakespeare, 
whilst they are an exact description of Bacon. 
Had he never written a line of verse, he would 
still have been considered a poet, by all who were 
acquainted with his writings. His poetry is essen- 
tially that of a made, not a born poet. It is not 
that poetry which is excited by the contemplation 
of external objects; but having drank deep of 
wisdom and knowledge, the rich flood bursts forth 
from his full heart and teeming intellect, carrying 
us along with it in its torrent of passion, whilst the 
light spray of its exuberant fancy dances around 
and glitters and gleams upon every object with 
which it comes in contact. Such too is his wit : 
it is not the result of animal spirits : no amount of 
exhilaration would produce it; there is nothing 
rollicking about it, except when he portrays a cha- 
racter so exceptional as Mercutio. Sickness or 
distress could not damp or destroy it. He had the 
materials within him ; and his active fancy, roving 
through the rich storehouse, loaded herself with 



OF SHAKESPEARE. 37 

its treasures, playfully bringing into juxtaposition 
things apparently remote and discordant. 

Look how the father's face 
Lives in his issue ; even so the race 
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners richly shines 
In his well-turned and true-filed lines. 

In illustration of these lines, we should be glad 
to find that the lineaments of Francis Bacon's face 
resembled those of Sir Nicholas ; his form certainly 
did not. That the mind and manners of the 
courtly Bacon shine in his " well-turned and true- 
filed lines/' no one will for a moment deny; it 
has been observed, there is " an odour of the court 
in his meanest characters/' It is the absence of 
all uproariousness, and that tone of high breeding 
which pervades them, which renders it impossible 
to believe that Shakespeare, even had he been all 
that his fondest admirers represent liim, could pos- 
sibly have produced these plays. It is sympathy 
with this which constitutes the excellence in read- 
ing or performing these plays. We may often 
hear the words delivered with great correctness of 
tone and emphasis, so that it would be impossible 
to say that they were badly delivered ; yet we feel 
that there is just that deficiency, which, when we 
hear Holy Scripture read under similar circum- 
stances, we characterise as want of devotion. 



38 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR 

That Jonson could pen hearty and direct praise, 
is evidenced by the following lines, which we ap- 
prehend cannot by any ingenuity be construed to 
allude to any other person. They are addressed 

TO ME. EDWABD ALLEN. 

If Rome so great, and in her wisest age, 
Fear'd not to boast the glories of her stage; 
As skilful Eoscius, and grave iEsop, men 
Yet crown'd with honours, as with riches then ; 
Who had no less a trumpet of their name 
Than Cicero, whose every breath was fame : 
How can so great example die in me ? 
That, Allen, I should pause to publish thee ; 
Who both their graces in thyself hast more 
Outstript, than they did all that went before, 
And present worth in all dost so contract 
As others speak, but only thou dost act. 
Wear this renown — 'tis just that who did give 
So many poets life, by one should live. 

There is a curious circumstance in connection 
with the effigies or portrait published with the 
folio of 1623. As no picture of Shakespeare was 
then in existence, and as it does not resemble the 
Stratford Monument, it must be considered an 
original production — conceived, it may be, in the 
same spirit as Ben Jonson's Verses ; so that the 
lines of the engraver, and of the poet, alike shadow 
forth Bacou, or Shakespeare, indifferently. This 
supposition is strengthened by the fact that Bacon's 



OF SHAKESPEARE. 39 

portrait, taken when he was eighteen years of age, 
an engraving of which is in Basil Montagu's edi- 
tion of his works, is similar in form to the portrait 
of Shakespeare published with the folio of 1623. 
It is simply a head in an oval, and has this motto 
round the margin : — 

Si tabula daretur digna animum mallem; 

which may well be rendered in the words applied 
to Shakespeare's portrait : — 

O could he but have drawn his wit 
As well in brass 3 as he hath hit 
His face, the print would then surpass 
All that was ever writ in brass. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PARALLEL PASSAGES, AND PECULIAR 

PHRASES, FROM BACON AND 

SHAKESPEARE. 

Poetry and prose, plays and philosophical writings, 
are generally considered so opposed and antago- 
nistic, that it seems unreasonable to expect to find 
in them similarity of ideas or coincidences of ex- 
pression ; yet these are to be found in Bacon and 
Shakespeare. 

Thus, in the Advancement of Learning : — 

Poetry is nothing else but feigned history. 

Twelfth Night, act i. sc. 2 : — 

Viola. 'Tis poetical. 

Olivia. It is the more likely to be feigned. 

As You Like It, act iii. sc. 7 : — 

The truest poety is the most feigning. 



PARALLEL PASSAGES, ETC. 41 

Essay on Building : — 

He that builds a fair house upon an ill seat cpmmitteth him- 
self to prison ; nor do I reckon that an ill seat only, where the 
air is unwholesome, but likewise where it is unequal. 

Macbeth, act i. sc, 6 : — 

This castle hath a pleasant seat— the air 
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself 
Unto our gentle senses. 



Advancement of Learning : — 

Behaviour seemeth to me a garment of the mind, and to have 
the conditions of a garment. For it ought to be made in fashion, 
it ought not to be too curious. 

Hamlet, act i. sc. 3 : — 

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, 
Eut not exprest in fancy. 



Advancement of Learning : 

Is not the opinion of Aristotle worthy to be regarded, where 
he saith, that young men are not fit auditors of moral philosophy, 
because they are not settled from the boiling heat of their affec- 
tions, nor attempered by time and experience. 

Troilus and Cressida, act ii. sc. 3 : — 

Not much 
Unlike young men, whom Aristotle thought 
Unfit to hear moral philosophy. 



Aristotle quoted incorrectly in both these pas- 
sages. He says political, not moral philosophy. 



42 PARALLEL PASSAGES, AND PECULIAR 

Advancement of Learning : — 

In the third place I set down reputation, because of the 
peremptory tides arid currents it hath, which, if they be not 
taken in due time, are seldom recovered, it being extreme hard 
to play an after-game of reputation. 

Julius Ccesar, act iv. sc. 3 : — 

There is a tide in the affairs of men 
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune : 
Omitted, all the voyage of their life 
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. 



Apophthegms ; — 

Bacon relates that a fellow named Hog impor- 
tuned Sir Nicholas to save his life on account of 
the kindred between Hog and Bacon. 

" Ay, but," replied the judge, " you and I cannot be kindred 
except you be hanged : for Hog is not Bacon until it be well 
hanged." 

Merry Wives of Windsor, act iv. sc. 1: — 

JSvans. Hung — Hang — Hog. 

D. Quickly. Hang Hog — is the Latin for Bacon. 



On Cunning : — 

For there be many wise men that have secret hearts, but 
transparent countenances. 

Henry IV. part 2, act i. sc. 1 : — 

And the whiteness in thy cheek, 
Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand. 



PHRASES, FROM BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 43 

Interpretation. of Nature : — ■ 

Yet evermore it must be remembered, that the least part of 
knowledge passed to man by this so large a charter from Grod — 
must be subject to that use for which Grod hath granted it, which 
is the benefit and relief of the state and society of man. 

Measure for Measure, act i. sc. 2 :— 

Nature never lends 
The smallest scruple of her excellence ; 
But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines 
Herself the glory of a creditor. 
Both use and thanks. 



Note the peculiar use of the words, knee and 
chew. 

Life of Henry VII. : — 

As his victory gave him the knee, so his purposed marriage 
with the Lady Elizabeth gave him the heart, so that both knee 
and heart did truly bow before him. 

Richard II. Show heaven the humbled heart and not the knee. 

Samlet. And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee. 

On Studies : — 

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some 
few chewed and digested. 

Henry V. act ii. sc. 2. 

How shall we stretch our eyes, 

When capital crimes, chewed, swallowed, and digested, 

Appear before us. 



44 PARALLEL PASSAGES, AND PECULIAR 

Letter to James L : — 

And therefore, in conclusion, he wished him not to shut the 
gate of your Majestie's mercy against himself, by being obdurate 
any longer. 

Henry, act iii. sc. 3 : — 

The gates of mercy shall be all shut up. 

Henry VI : — 

Open the gate of mercy, gracious Lord. 



Trench says, Essays was a new word in Bacon's 

time, and his use of it quite novel. Bacon thus 

writes of his Essays : — 

"Which I have called Essays. The word is late, though the 
thing is ancient. 

Mrs. Clark, in her Concordance, reports the 
word Essays as occurring twice in Shakespeare, 
which indeed is true of Knight's Shakespeare ; but 
it only occurs once in the folio of 1 623, in relation 
to Edgar's letter to Edmund, who says : — 

I hope, for my brother's justification, he wrote this but as an 
essay or taste of my nature. 



On Masques : — 

It is better they should be graced with elegancy, than daubed 
with cost. 

Lear, act iv. sc 1: — 

"Edgar. Poor Tom 's a-cold ; I cannot daub it further. 



PHRASES, FROM BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 45 

Henry VII. : — 

All was inned at last into the King's barn. 

All's Well that Ends Well, act i. sc. 3 :— 

He that ears my land, spares my team, 
And gives me leave to inn my crop. 



Of Adversity :— 

It is more pleasing to have a lively work upon a sad and 
solemn ground, than to have a dark and melancholy work upon 
a lightsome ground. 

Henry IV. act i. sc. 2 : — 

Bright metals on a sullen ground 

Will show more goodly, and attract more eyes, 

Than that which hath no foil to set it off. 



Natural History : — 

The flesh shrinketh, but the bone resisteth, whereby the cold 
becometh more eager. 

Hamlet, act i. sc. 4 : — 

Sam. The ah 1 bites shrewdly — it is very cold ; 
Hor. It is a nipping and an eager air. 



We tried an experiment, but it sorted not. 

Johnson quotes this observation of Bacon's, to 
illustrate a line in Taming of the Shrew, act iv. 
sc. 7 : — 

And all my pains is sorted to no proof. 



46 PARALLEL PASSAGES, AND PECULIAR 

New Atlantis :— 

Never heard of any the least inkling or glimpse of this island. 

Coriolanus, act i. sc. 1 :— 

They have had inkling, this fortnight, what we intend to do, 
which now we '11 show 'em in deeds. 

Henry VIII. act ii. sc. 1 :— 

Yet I can give you inkling 
Of an ensuing evil. 



Life of Henry VI L : — 

He was a comely personage, a little above just stature, well 
and straight limbed, but slender. 

2 Henry IV. act iv. sc 1 : — 

The prince is here at hand, pleaseth your lordships 
To meet his grace, just distance 'tween our armies, 



Natural Hist. cent. ii. 136 : — 

For the sound will be greater or lesser, as the barrel is more 
empty or more full. 

Lear, act i : — 

Nor are those empty hearted, whose low sound 
Eeverbs no hollowness. 



Advancement of Learning : — 

Not unlike to that which amongst the Eomans, was expressed 
in the familiar or household terms of Promus and Condus. 

Henry V. act iv. sc. 3 : — 

Familiar in their mouths as household words. 



PHRASES, FROM BACON AND SHAKESPEARE. 47 

Natural Hist. cent. i. 98 : — 

Like prospectives, which show things inwards when they are 
but paintings. 

Richard II. act ii, sc. 2 : — 

Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon 
Show nothing but confusion — ey'd awry, 
Distinguish form. — 



CHAPTER VIII. 
PLAYERS. 

Strype, in his edition of Stow published in the year 
1720, says: — " Acting plays for the diversion and 
entertainment of the court, the gentry, and any 
others, is become a calling whereby many get their 
living. How lawfully, is another question. Players 
in former times were retainers, and none had the 
privilege to act plays but such. So, in Queen 
Elizabeth's time, many of the great nobility had 
tenants and retainers, who were players, and went 
about getting their livelihood that way. 

" The Lord Admiral had players, and so had the 
Lord Strange, that played within the city of Lon- 
don. It was not unusual then, upon any gentle- 
man's complaint of them, for abuses or undecent 
reflections practised in their plays, to have them 
put down. Thus, once the Lord Treasurer signified 



PLAYERS. 49 

to the Lord Mayor Hart, to have these players of 
the Lord Admiral and Lord Strange prohibited, at 
least for some time, because one Mr. Tilney had 
utterly, for some reason, disliked them. Whereupon 
the Mayor sent for both companies, and gave them 
a strict charge, and required them in the Queen's 
name, to forbear playing for some time, till further 
order might be given for their allowance. 

" The Lord Admiral's players obeyed ; but the 
Lord Strange ; s, in a contentious manner, went away 
to the Cross Keys, and played that afternoon, to 
the great offence of the better sort, who knew they 
were prohibited by order from the Lord Treasurer. 
So the Mayor committed two of them to the 
Counter, and prohibited all playing for the future, 
till the Lord Treasurer's pleasure was further 
known." 

Seymour also, in his Survey of London and West- 
minster, after briefly noticing a play, anno 1391, 
played by the Parish Clerks at the Skinners' Well 
beside Smithfield, w T hich continued three days to- 
gether, the King, Queen, and nobles of the land, 
being present; and another played in the year 
1409, which lasted eight days, and was of matter 
from the creation of the world, observes : — " Of 
later times, instead of these stage plays, have been 

4 



50 PLAYERS. 

used comedies, tragedies, interludes, and histories 
both true and feigned. For acting whereof certain 
public places, as the Theatre, the Curtain, &c. were 
erected. They played also in inns, as the Cross 
Keys, the Bull, the Globe, &c. But this which was 
once a recreation, and used therefor now and then 
occasionally, afterwards by abuse became a trade 
and calling, and so remains to this day. In those 
former days, ingenious tradesmen, and gentlemen's 
servants, would sometimes gather a company of 
themselves and learn interludes, to expose vice, or 
to represent the noble actions of our ancestors in 
former times \ and these they played at certain 
festival times, and in private houses at weddings, 
or other splendid entertainments, for their own 
profit, acted before such as were minded to divert 
themselves at them." 

From these passages, we learn the several stages 
through which acting passed, previously to be- 
coming a regular trade and calling. 

For the recreation and diversion of the Queen, 
the Students of the Inns of Court, and the Mem- 
bers of the Universities, acted plays before her. 

These were entirely complimentary. The Queen 
paid nothing for witnessing, neither did the per- 
formers receive anything for enacting them. 



PLAYERS. 51 

Ingenious tradesmen, servants and retainers of 
noblemen, citizens, and gentlemen, also gathered a 
company of themselves together, and acted plays 
for the amusement of their customers and em- 
ployers. These entertainments were of the same 
character, and dictated by the same feelings, as 
those given by the lawyers and university men to 
the Queen. 

But, with the permission and license of the 
noblemen with whom they were connected, these 
servants and retainers sometimes acted plays at 
certain festival times, and in private houses, " at 
weddings and other splendid entertainments, for 
their own profit." Here we have a slight change 
in the nature of Play-acting; for though the play is 
still acted in a private house, and to a private au- 
dience, it is clear that the Actors perform for gain. 
Then — probably about the year 1570 — came the 
final change, which has endured until the present 
time. Play-acting became a trade and calling, and 
certain persons devoted themselves exclusively to it 
as a means of livelihood. They were engaged by 
those who were minded to divert themselves at them, 
or they themselves engaged some House, Inn, or 
Yard, and admitted persons upon payment to 
witness their performances. 



52 PLAYERS. 

Shortly after this great change in the economy 
of play-acting, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of 
the city of London passed an act, which, after 
enumerating the moral and physical evils which . 
resulted from " the inordinate haunting of great 
numbers of people, especially youth, to plays, in- 
terludes, and shows/' enacts, "to the intent that 
such perils may be avoided, and the lawful, honest, 
and comely use of plays, pastimes, and recreations 
in good sort only be permitted/' that " no play, 
comedy, tragedy, interlude, nor show, shall be 
openly played, wherein shall be allowed any words, 
examples, or any doing of any unchastity, sedition, 
nor such like unfit or unseemly matter, upon pain 
of imprisonment for fourteen days, and a penalty 
of £5 for every such offender." 

This act also enacts, that every play, &c, shall 
be perused and allowed by a proper officer before 
it is performed, and no additional matter inter- 
laced, added, mingled, or altered, after it has been 
so allowed, under a penalty. That no person shall 
suffer any plays to be openly played, or take any 
benefit or advantage from such performance, unless 
with the license and permission of the Chamberlain 
of the city of London. And after enacting that 
all persons so licensed, shall make a certain con- 



PLAYERS. 53 

tribution to the support of the hospitals or sick 
poor of the city of London, the act concludes 
thus : — " Provided always, that this act, otherwise 
than touching the publishing of unchaste, sedi- 
tious, and unmeet matters, shall not extend to any 
plays, interludes, comedies, tragedies, or shews, to be 
played or shewed in the private house, dwelling, or 
lodging of any Nobleman, Citizen, or Gentleman, 
which shall or will then have the same there played 
or shewed in his presence for the festivity of any 
marriage, assembly of friends, or any like case, 
without public or common collection of money of the 
auditory or beholders thereof. Referring always to 
the Lord Mayor and Aldermen for the time being 
the judgment and construction according to equity, 
what shall be counted such a playing and shewing 
in a private place ; anything in this act to the con- 
trary notwithstanding." 

From this act we learn that in 1573, the players 
were in the habit of openly playing — that is, of 
acting plays to which any person might resort at 
different inns and taverns of the City. 

These inns and taverns were of every variety of 
consequence and respectability, in accordance with 
the rank and character of the parties who resorted 
to them ; and as the company varied, so doubtless 



54 PLAYERS. 

did the nature and scale of the amusements thereat 
provided. 

We may well suppose that one tavern-keeper 
would provide play-acting as part of the entertain- 
ment of his guests, as private individuals did for 
theirs. Another would allow actors to perform 
before his guests, obtaining from them, for them- 
selves, such gratuitous remuneration as they could 
collect. Whilst another would let them the use 
of his House or Yard, with permission to impose 
a charge upon any person witnessing their per- 
formance. 

Now, all this is provided for in the act of Com- 
mon Council passed in the 17th of Queen Eliza- 
beth. The Lord Mayor and Aldermen do not at- 
tempt to prevent plays being acted : their act only 
affects them when openly played. " The public or 
common collection of money of the auditory or 
beholders thereof," would seem to be a notable 
characteristic of open playing; but these wise 
mayors and aldermen, seeing that is not conclusive 
evidence, reserved to themselves "the judgment 
or construction, according to equity, of what shall 
be considered an open playing, and what a playing 
or shewing in a private place." 

Against this act of Common Council, the Queen's 



PLAYERS. 55 

poor players, as they called themselves, petitioned 
the Lords of the Privy Council ; and, though they 
were countenanced and supported by Leicester, 
the act (or Remedies, as it was called) was not 
interfered with ; and shortly afterwards the Privy 
Council issued these rules for the regulation of 
the players. (This was during a visitation of the 
plague.) 

" That they (the players) hold themselves con- 
tent with playing at private houses, at weddings, 
&c, without public assemblies. 

" If more be thought good to be tolerated, that 
they then be restrained to the orders of the act of 
the Common Council — tempore Hawes. 

" That they play not openly, till the whole deaths 
in London have been come in twenty days unto 
fifty a week, nor longer than it shall so continue. 

" That no plays be on the sabbath-day. 

" That no playing be on holidays, but after 
evening prayer, nor any received into the auditory 
until after evening prayer. 

" That no playing be in the dark, nor continue 
any such time but as any of the auditory may re- 
turn to their dwellings in London before sunset, 
or, at least, before it be dark. 

"That the Queen's players only be tolerated, 



56 PLAYERS. 

and of them their number and certain * names to 
be notified in your lordship's letter to the Lord 
Mayor, and to the justices of Middlesex and Surrey; 
and those, her players, not to divide themselves 
into several companies. 

"That for breaking any of these orders, their 
toleration cease." 

"But notwithstanding," continues Strype, "these 
orders were not duly observed, and the lew r d 
matters of plays increased ; and in the haunt unto 
them were found many dangers, both for religion, 
state, honesty of manners, unthriftiness of the poor, 
danger of infection, &c; and the preachers daily 
crying out against them, suit was made, that they 
might be banished the liberties of the City and 
places adjoining." 

This was accordingly done, and the players were 
not allowed license or permission for any perform- 
ance within the city of London after the year 
1575. To reconcile what took place in 1589 with 
this total expulsion of the players in 1575, we 
must believe, which we readily may, that during 
some mayoralties the act of Common Council was 
not so rigidly enforced as in others. Certain, 
however, it is, that the City, as a body, were sadly 

* Or, as we should now say, real names. 



PLAYERS. 0/ 

inimical to the poor players, and no theatre, that 
is, place for the exclusive performance of plays, was 
ever allowed within its liberties. 

YTe have taken some pains to investigate the 
enmity the City authorities seem to have always 
entertained against the poor players, and it appears 
not to have been directed so much against plays 
as such, as against open playing, that is, playing to 
which the common people had access. 

The word education,"* in Bacon's time, was 
almost exclusively used in relation to the body ; 
learning was the word used to denote mental 
culture. 

The policy of the times of Elizabeth was to 
educate or train the bodies of the people, and 
render them strong and athletic, but to keep their 
minds dull and ignorant. Bacon entertained a 
contrary opinion : he thought learning could not 
possibly do any one mischief. " It is manifest/ ; 
says he,f " that there is no danger at all in the 
proportion or quantity of knowledge, how large so 
ever, lest it should make it (man's mind) swell or 

* " Certainly custom is most perfect, when it beginneth in 
young years ; this we call education, which is, in effect, but an 
early custom." — Bacon's Essays. 

t Advancement of Learning. 



58 PLAYERS. 

outcompass itself ; no, but it is merely the quality 
of knowledge, which, be it more or less, if it be 
taken without the true corrective thereof, hath 
in it some nature of venom or malignity, and 
some effects of that venom, which is ventosity or 
swelling." 

A fear that the people might learn to think, and 
an unlucky tendency which the players had of ridi- 
culing absurdity, had no small share in exciting 
the apprehension and provoking the animosity 
of the civic authorities. For we find it urged 
against the playhouse that it took the people away 
not only from the church, but also from the bear- 
baiting ; whilst we find an alderman was even then 
an ordinary butt for the wits. When discoursing 
upon so grave a subject as Death, Bacon cannot 
"spare or pass by a jest" at them, he says : — 

" Death finds not a worse friend than an alder- 
man, to whose door I never knew him welcome; 
but he is an importunate guest, and will not be 
said nay. And though they themselves shall affirm, 
that they are not within, yet the answer will not 
be taken ; and that which heightens their fear, 
is, that they know they are in danger to forfeit 
their flesh, but are not wise of the payment day ; 
which sickly uncertainty is the occasion that for 



PLAYERS. 59 

1 

the most part, they step out of the world un- 
furnished for their general account, and, being all 
unprovided, desire yet to hold their gravity, pre- 
paring their souls to answer in scarlet." 

The pretence under which the players were 
banished the City, that is, as we understand it, for- 
bidden to have any public performance within the 
liberties, is stated to have been the many dangers 
both for religion, state, honesty of manners, un- 
thriftiness of the poor, danger of infection, &c. 
The City authorities at last proceeded in a very 
summary manner. Whilst the players were crafts- 
men, servants, and retainers, they felt compelled 
to give some show of reason for their conduct, 
which, under these altered circumstances, they 
appear to have considered much less necessary. 

The principle upon which the City now pro- 
ceeded, seems to have been — As they wont work, 
they sha'nt play. It is hardly so correct to say, 
play-acting became a trade and calling, as it is to 
say, these persons ceased to be " men of any oc- 
cupation." They quitted their previous callings, 
and, as play-acting was not recognised as a craft, 
they became in the eye of the law, rogues and 
vagabonds — men with no obvious means of liveli- 
hood, and, as such, liable to be taken up and 



60 PLAYERS. 

punished by whipping, fine, or imprisonment. 
Finding themselves in this pedicament, they ap- 
plied to the Earl of Leicester, who obtained for 
them a protecting license from the Queen, con- 
tingent upon their good behaviour, and liable to 
be taken away at any time. 

Thus the Queen's Players became licensed Va- 
gabonds, as the Queen's Bedesmen were licensed 
Beggars. 

It was to this class that William Shakespeare 
belonged. 

We do but draw an historical portrait, painting 
it in black and white. We have no desire to dis- 
parage the Thespian art ; in our Utopia, we should 
rank Players as Preachers ; and we regret that our 
reading has led us to the conclusion, that Plays are 
not the legitimate descendants of the Mysteries, 
but spring from quite a different stock. 

The playhouse is the people's sermon-book with 
pictures ; its object should be to amuse, delight, 
instruct, exalt. 

Whoever writes respecting the Theatre, feels 
constrained to say something about the Greek 
Drama and the Roman Plays, and then proceed to 
the Mysteries and Moralities; but we think it 
might easily be proved that the Mysteries and Mo- 



PLAYERS. 61 

ralities had as little to do with the British stage, 
as the Greek drama or Roman plays. The Mys- 
teries and Moralities were, we doubt not, first pro- 
duced for the purpose of propagating religion ; they 
were persevered in by the priests, to preserve their 
power. There was so much of fiction and absur- 
dity mixed up with religious truth, that the people 
soon turned the tables upon the priests, and the 
persecuted Devil and the Vice became the most 
popular persons in the performance. 

These Mysteries and Moralities were openly 
played by the parish clerks and others connected 
with the state religion, who thus endeavoured to 
influence the people. The public preachings at 
Paul's Cross and other places, the May meetings 
at Exeter Hall, the outpourings at Surrey Chapel 
or the Surrey Gardens, are their ligitimate issue. 
The English drama had a much earlier and more 
domestic origin : Private playings commenced long 
before, and continued during, these public religious 
exhibitions, until, as w r e shall presently demon- 
strate, the theatre became an institution of the 
country. The child's exclamation, "Let 's play" is 
the sesame to the English drama. We may daily 
witness it on our domestic hearths. Your little boy 
will be papa, your little girl mamma, and dolly 



62 PLAYERS. 

shall be their child. Dolly is dandled, praised, and 
punished ; her dress and her duties arranged and 
rearranged, discussed and disputed over, till the 
playmates quarrel, and seek their parents to adjust 
their differences. 

Here we have a domestic drama, representing 
the cares, passions, pleasures, and anxieties of life, 
and, as it were, carried on into a future of rewards 
and punishments. 

The highest reach of the drama is but an am- 
plification of this ; and none is enduring which is 
not founded on a basis as simple and natural. 

Banish Hamlet from the precincts of the Court 
of Denmark — strip him of his inky cloak — forget 
the fine painting with the upturned eyes and the 
skull in the left hand — dress him in a frock-coat 
and plaid trousers — call him Mr. Brown or Mr. 
Smith — and, placed in circumstances equally per- 
plexing, you shall find that an ordinary man would 
act, if not in a precisely, certainly in a proxi- 
mately similar manner, to that pursued by the 
Prince of Denmark. 

Like a skilful artist, the poet draws the natural 
figure, and then adds the appropriate drapery ; 
others, like milliners and tailors exhibiting their 
fabrics, make the outward semblance of a human 



PLAYERS. 63 

being, which, when we come to examine, we find as 
foreign to nature, as wire and whalebone are to 
flesh and blood. 

Hamlet is not a grand conception, as we vul- 
garly count grandeur. It is more largely grand : 
— it is grand in the truth and simplicity of 
nature. — 



CHAPTER IX. 

PLAYHOUSES. 

Bubbage and his fellows having, through the 
influence of Leicester, obtained a license from the 
Queen in 1574, they took a house in Blackfriars 
(which was then without the liberties of the City), 
and altered and fitted it up as a theatre in 1576. 

The Theatre and the Curtain, two places in 
Shored itch where plays were performed, appear to 
have been already in existence. Of these very lit- 
tle is known ; and we are disposed to think the 
theatre in Blackfriars the first jMblic theatre; 
though all the commentators and critics have 
chosen to consider it, what they denominate, a 
private theatre. 

" Our old theatres," says Collier, " were either 
public or private." — "What," says Malone, " were 
the distinguishing marks of a private playhouse, 
it is not easy to ascertain. We know only that it 
was smaller than those which were called public 



PLAYHOUSES. 65 

theatres ; and that in the private theatres, plays 
were usually presented by candlelight." 

" From various authorities," says Collier, rf I find 
that there were seven distinguishing marks of a 
private playhouse. 

" 1. Private theatres were of smaller dimensions 
than public theatres. 

" 2. They were entirely roofed in from the wea- 
ther, while public theatres were open to the sky, 
excepting over the stage, and boxes or rooms. 

" 3. The performances at private theatres were 
by candle or torch light. 

" 4. They had pits furnished with seats ; and 
not yards, as they were called in public theatres, 
where the spectators stood to behold the plays. 

" 5. The audience at private theatres usually 
consisted of a superior class of persons. 

" 6. The visitors there had a right to sit upon 
the stage during the performance. 

" 7. The boxes or rooms of private theatres were 
enclosed or locked." 

Although agreeing with Mr. Tomlin, " that it 
is with diffidence that any one should differ with 
Mr. Collier in matters to which he has devoted 
so much ability, so perseveringly, and with such 
unusual advantages," yet it certainly would not be 

5, 



66 PLAYHOUSES. 

difficult, " from various authorities," to controvert 
or explain away every one of these " seven dis- 
tinguishing marks of a private playhouse/' 

Every one at all conversant with the subject, 
knows that several of these "distinguishing marks" 
were not peculiar to private playhouses ; and, even 
if they were their usual characteristics, they, indi- 
vidually and collectively, afford no sufficient reason 
why such a theatre should be called private. 

The word public is definite and intelligible 
enough. Private does not admit of so precise a 
definition. Oxford Street is a public way wherein 
we all may walk at all times. Lansdown Passage, 
the narrow passage between the gardens of Devon- 
shire and Lansdown Houses, is a private way ; so 
is the road through Hyde Park : yet the former 
is not discernible from a public way, except on 
Sept. 1, when it is closed; and the latter is essen- 
tially a public way to every one who does not rise 
before five in the morning, nor journey abroad 
after ten at night. It would be easy to enumerate 
various other ways which are so strictly private 
that few, or none, may walk therein. 

In these cases, having defined what " public " is, 
we may safely assert that " private " is anything 
that is not public. 



PLAYHOUSES. 0/ 

It has ever been held, that any place or theatre 
to which payment alone entitles any person to the 
right to enter, must be considered a public place or 
theatre. 

A theatre being public or private did not, nor 
does not, depend upon its construction or the de- 
portment of the auditory, but solely in the cir- 
cumstances by which admission to it is obtained ; 
and this is often so nice a question, that we see in 
the act we recently referred to, the Mayor and 
Aldermen wisely l( reserved to themselves the judg- 
ment and construction, according to equity, as to 
what shall be counted such a playing or showing 
in a private place." 

If the definition of public and private which we 
have endeavoured to establish, be correct, it will 
tend to elucidate much that has hitherto been 
obscure. Plays acted by students of the inns of 
court, and the members of the universities, before 
the Queen, and by servants and retainers before 
noblemen, citizens, and gentlemen, their employers, 
not being accessible to everybody, are doubtless to 
be considered private playings. But when these 
noblemen gave their servants permission to perform 
for their own profit, besides performing at private 
houses, at weddings, and other splendid entertain- 



68 PLAYHOUSES. 

ments, they also played at inns and taverns. The 
professed players must have done so, until they 
obtained a theatre to themselves, and probably 
continued to do so after that time. But in either 
case the public playing did not depend upon 
locality; but wherever a play was openly played, 
that place was for the time being, whether a tavern 
or a yard, a public theatre. 

The Blackfriars Theatre being exclusively de- 
voted to the acting of plays, was in a special sense 
a public theatre, at which those persons who had 
adopted play-acting as a trade or calling found a 
local habitation, and carried on their occupation 
for the purpose of obtaining a livelihood. 

Some writers will insist that this theatre at 
Blackfriars was the Drury Lane of the days of 
Elizabeth, and that the license granted to the 
players was equivalent to a modern patent. The 
very reverse of this was the fact : the license was 
not a mark of approbation, but of toleration; it 
was not so much to secure them certain privi- 
leges, as to confine them within due limits, and 
render them more promptly amenable to the law. 
Thus the last clause in the orders of the Privy 
Council expressly states — " That for breaking any 
of these orders, their toleration cease." 



PLAYHOUSES. 69 

There is another sense in which the words pub- 
lic and private are used, which may possibly have 
misled Mr. Collier. Inns and taverns were called 
in the days of Elizabeth, as indeed they are now, 
public-houses ; and when the actors performed at 
the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court, 
they called it playing at a private house \ and per- 
forming at the Globe, the Cross Keys, or any inns 
or taverns, they called playing at a public house. 

So a public house was ordinarily a private thea- 
tre, and the public theatre was a private house. 

The following abstract from a pamphlet* in the 
King's Library, British Museum, supports this view: 

" Oppressed with many calamities, and languish- 
ing to death under a long and (for ought we know) 
an everlasting restraint, we, the comedians, trage- 
dians, and actors of all sorts and sizes belonging 
to the famous private and public houses within the 
city of London and the suburbs thereof, to you 
Great Phoebus, and you Sacred Sisters, the sole 
patronesses of our distressed calling, do we in all 
humility present this our humble and lamentable 
complaint, by whose intercession to those powers 

* The Actors' Remonstrance or Complaint for the Silencing 
their Profession, and Banishment from their several Playhouses, 
London : Printed by Edw. Xickson, Jan. 24, 1643. 



70 PLAYHOUSES. 

who confined us to silence, we hope to be restored 
to our pristine honour and employment. 

" First, it is not unknown to all the audience that 
have frequented the private houses of Blackfriars, 
the Cockpit, and Salisbury Court, without auste- 
rity, we have purged our stages from all obscene 
and scurrilous jests; such as might either be guilty 
of corrupting the manners or defaming the persons 
of any men of note in the city or kingdom e ; that 
we have endeavoured, as much as in us lies, to 
instruct one another in the true and genuine art of 
acting, to repress brawling and railing, formerly in 
great request, and for to suite our language and 
action to the more gentile and natural garbe of the 
times/ 5 

As our object is merely to point out the allusion 
to public and private houses, we shall not proceed 
with the quotation. The pamphlet will be found 
interesting to any one wishing to make himself 
acquainted with the quality of the public playhouse 
of this period 

The interior architectural arrangements of an 
ancient theatre were much the same as those of 
the present day. The gallery, or scaffold as it was 
called, occupied three sides of the house, assuming, 
according to the plan of the building, a square or 



PLAYHOUSES. 71 

semicircular form. Beneath this were small di- 
visions called rooms, answering in almost every 
respect to our boxes ; these seem occasionally to 
have been the property of private individuals, who 
in that case kept them locked. The centre part, 
which was then called the pit, had neither floor 
nor benches. The common people standing here 
to see the performances are therefore called in 
Hamlet, cc groundlings " — a term repeated by 
Decker, who speaks of " the groundling and gallery 
commoner buying his sport by the penny." The 
pit was separated from the stag'e by a paling; 
there was no intervening orchestra; the music, 
consisting of one or more trumpets, cornets, haut- 
boys, lutes, recorders, viols, or organs, was placed 
in a raised balcony, nearly occupying the space of 
the upper stage-box in our modern theatres. The 
stage was elevated above the pit as at present, and 
had an upper stage or gallery at the back, which 
had curtains to draw in front. Part of the per- 
formance was carried on in this upper stage, as 
when the actors were to speak from a window or 
battlement, or to overhear what was going on, on 
the lower stage. There were curtains sliding on 
rings and rods in other parts of the lower stage, 
through which the actors made their exits and en- 



72 PLAYHOUSES. 

trances. It may with safety be affirmed that the 
Blackfriars Theatre had originally no scenery. The 
locality of the scene was indicated by a written 
paper placed at the back of the stage; the ima- 
gination of the audience supplied the rest. 

Sir Philip Sydney, describing the state of the 
drama and the stage in his time, about 1583, says : 
— " Now, you shall have three ladies walk to gather 
flowers, and then you must believe the stage to be 
a garden. By-and-by, we have news of a ship- 
wreck in the same place ; then we are to blame if 
we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of 
that comes out an hideous monster, with fire and 
smoke, and the miserable beholders are bound to 
take it for a cave ; while, in the mean time, two 
armies fly in, represented with four swords and 
bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive 
it for a pitched field ? " 

Hitherto the description of the theatre has 
reference to its appearance during the reign of 
Elizabeth. Decker mentions some other accom- 
modation; but his work, The Guls Home Book, 
or Fashions to suit all Sorts of Guls, was not 
published until 1609; he says, that there were 
private boxes on each side of the stage, " almost 
smothered in darkness/' and also that seats or 



PLAYHOUSES. 73 

stools were allowed to be placed on the stage, which 
were usually occupied by the wits, gallants, and 
critics of the day. " For by sitting on the stage/' 
says he, " you have a signed patent to engross the 
whole commodity of censure; may lawfully pre- 
sume to be a girder, and stand at the helm and 
steer the passage of scenes." 

He enumerates other advantages appreciated by 
the fast men of his day. 

The prices of admission seem to have varied from 
a penny up to a shilling, and even two shillings, 
upon some extraordinary occasions. 

Prior to the commencement of the play, the 
audience amused themselves with cards, smoking 
tobacco, drinking ale, cracking nuts, and eating 
fruit, which were regularly supplied by men attend- 
ing the theatre, by whose vociferations and clamour, 
as a writer of the time expresses it, iC you were 
made adder-deaf by pippin cry." The stage had 
very little if any decoration ; it was sometimes hung 
with black for tragedy; but the wardrobes are re- 
ported to have been costly. This we can readily 
suppose, as the actors performed upon all occasions 
in the court- dress of the period; and as the clothes 
of the nobility and gentry descended as heirlooms, 
and tinsel and tawdry as yet were not, much expense 



74 PLAYHOUSES. 

must necessarily have been incurred in providing 
dresses. Sir Henry Wotton alludes to their mag- 
nificence in the letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, in 
which he narrates the destruction of the Globe 
Theatre, July 2nd, 1613 :— 

" Now, to let matters of state sleep I will en- 
tertain you with what hath happened this week at 
the Bankside. 

" The King's players had a new play, called All 
is True, representing some principall pieces in the 
reign of Henry VIII., which was set forth with 
many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and 
majesty, even to the matting of the stage, the 
knights of the order, with their Georges and garter, 
the guards with their embroidered coats, and the 
like, sufficient in truth, within a while, to make 
greatness very familiar, if not ridiculous. 

"Now, King Henry making a masque at the 
Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain chambers 
being shot off at the entry, some of the paper or 
other stuff wherewith one of them was stopped, 
did light on the thatch, where, being thought at 
first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more at- 
tentive to the show, it kindled inwardly and ran 
round like a train, consuming within less than an 
hour the whole house to the very grounds. This 



PLAYHOrSES. /5 

was the fatal period to that virtuous fabrique, 
wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw 
and a few forsaken cloaks ; only one man had his 
breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled 
him, if he had not, by the benefit of a provident 
wit, put it out with bottle-ale." 

From what has been already advanced respect- 
ing players and theatres, we proceed to draw some 
inferences. 

We believe the Blackfriars to have beeu a public 
theatre, and that the " common plaies," being ac- 
cessible to every one who could command the small 
sum charged for admission, were resorted to by the 
very lowest of the people. We say the " common 
plaies" ; for discarding Mr. Collier's distinction of 
public and private, and adopting the one suggested 
in its stead, renders intelligible the words, common 
plaies, which occur not unfrequently. 

The "common plaies" were, we apprehend, the 
ordinary performances to which every one could 
obtain access upon payment; but occasionally noble- 
men and others commanded a play, and secured the 
house for themselves and their friends : thus the 
Blackfriars Theatre was, as every theatre since has 
been and is, both a public and a private theatre : 
public, in that the proprietors were licensed or 



76 PLAYHOUSES. 

allowed to take money and admit any one to see 
the acting ; but private, when it was secured or 
engaged, which at any time it might be, for a 
performance to which the general public were not 
admitted. 

That the Whitefriars Theatre could be so en- 
gaged or "taken up," is evidenced by a letter 
(without date) of Sir Henry "Wotton to Sir Edmund 
Bacon : — 

" On Sunday last, at night, and no longer, some 
sixteen apprentices (of what sort you may guess, 
by the rest of the story) having secretly learnt a 
a new play without book, intituled The Hog has 
lost his Pearl, took up the White Fryers for their 
theatre, and having invited thither (as it would 
seem) rather their mistresses than their masters, 
who were all to enter per buletini, for a note of 
distinction from ordinary comedians, towards the 
end of the play the sheriffs (who by chance had 
heard of it) came in (as they say) and carried some 
six or seven of them to perform the last act of it 
at Bridewell ; the rest are fled. Now, it is strange 
to hear how sharp-witted the City is ; for they will 
needs have Sir Thomas Swinnerton, the Lord 
Mayor, be meant by the Hog, and the late Lord 
Treasurer, by the Pearl/" 



PLAYHOUSES. / / 

At this public theatre, to which every one could 
obtain access, and the lowest of the people ordi- 
narily resorted, the ordinary performances doubt- 
less were, as it might be expected they would be, 
of the coarsest and most ordinary description. 
Yet we are called upon to believe that it was here 
that the wonderful works which we all so greatly 
admire, and feel that we can only properly appre- 
ciate by careful private study, were performed ; and 
it was from the profit arising from this wretched 
place of amusement that Shakespeare realised the 
far from inconsiderable fortune with which he in a 
few years retired to Stratford-upon-Avon. 

Commentators say, We do not find that the plays 
attributed to Shakespeare were ever performed at 
any other theatre. They do not say, which they 
might, T\ r e do not find that they were ever per- 
formed at this. 

We cannot but think that the best plays must 
have been performed at the best, the most exclusive, 
that is, the private theatres — the theatres held at 
inns, taverns, &c, to which the most respectable 
portion of the community resorted. 

Of these the Rose seems to have been at that- 
time the most eminent. 

It was here, and at similar places, before au- 
diences capable of appreciating them, that these 



78 PLAYHOUSES. 

plays doubtless were performed in their integrity. 
And Shakespeare's company made their money, 
either by supplying the actors at these superior 
theatres with dramas, or by performing them be- 
fore those audiences themselves. 

The only account we have of the performance 
of Tivelfih Night is from the Table Book of John 
Manningham, student of the Middle Temple, and 
it confirms this idea : — 

"February, 1601. — At our feast we had a play 
called Tivelfth Night, or What You Will, much like 
the Comedy of Errors, or Menechmis in Plautus, 
but more like or neare to that in Italian called 
Inganni. A good practice in it, to make the 
steward believe his lady widdowe was in love with 
him, by counterfeiting a letter as from a lady, in 
generall terms telling him what shee liked best in 
him, and prescribing his gestures, inscribing his 
apparaile, &c, and then, when he came to practise, 
making him believe they took him to be mad. ;j> — 
Knight 3 ^Cyclopcedia of Londo?i, from HarleianMSS. 

That some of the plays may have been performed 
as " common plaies" at Shakespeare's own theatre, 
is very possible ; but if they were, they were doubt- 
less altered, mutilated, and interpolated, to suit the 
taste of that wretched audience. 



CHAPTER X. 

PLAY-WRITERS. 

We have seen how Play-acting, " which was once 
a recreation, and used therefor now and then occa- 
sianally, afterwards by abuse, became a trade and 
calling, and so remains to this day." 

We have seen how plays, which were originally 
performed in the open air, and then at inns and 
taverns, had at length found a habitation of 
their own, and the playhouse was a recognised 
institution. 

This state of things involved another and most 
important change ; for, as plays were now conti- 
nually being performed, in order that the actors 
might procure their daily bread, it became essential 
that there should be a continual supply of novelties 
to stimulate the curiosity of the public, and attract 
an audience. 

It was of the first importance to the actors too, 
that the authors should be men that would produce 



80 PLAY-WRITERS. 

matter congenial to the taste, and level with the 
understandings, of those who came to hear it. The 
profound wisdom and the noble language of the 
writers of that time were ill suited for such a pur- 
pose. This new demand, therefore, called into 
existence an entirely new class of writers. 

Men hitherto had written from the fulness of 
their souls ; these latter were more actuated by the 
emptiness of their stomachs. The editor of the 
Illustrated London News (December 6th, 1856) 
states : — " So far was the vocation of dramatist for 
pecuniary profit from being attended with dis- 
honour or fraught with detriment to a writer's 
professional prospects, that Sackville, the Lord 
Treasurer under the reigns of Elizabeth and James, 
was a confessed dramatist/' 

The Athenmim (September 13th, 1856), says: — 
" Connection with ' poets and players ' was no bar 
to public employments, under either Elizabeth or 
James. Sackville, the Lord Treasurer under both 
reigns, was a poet and a dramatist. Sydney and 
Raleigh, though occupying places at court, and 
commanding armies and fleets, were poets. Some 
of the strongest men of the time, such as Donne, 
rose wholly by the tower of rhyme. The Shep- 
herd's Calender made Spenser secretary to the 



PLAY -WRITERS. 81 

Lord Deputy of Ireland. A weakness for verses 
did not prevent Wotton from going as ambassador 
to Venice. Nay, poetry was no obstacle to success 
at the bar, for Davis was eminent as a poet before 
he was known as Irish Attorney- General or Speaker 
of the Irish House of Commons. All these facts 
help to prove that, if Bacon were the author of the 
Shakespeare Plays, he had some other motive for 
concealing the fact than the fears imagined by 
Mr. Smith." 

We cannot find the slightest trace that these 
great men were either paid for writing, or obtained 
any pecuniary advantage by so doing. We believe 
that Bacon and others were, on the contrary, rather 
impoverished by it. So far from seeking pecuniary 
profit in the discharge of this self-imposed duty, 
they had often a greater regard to the general good, 
than to their own reputations. 

"I have heard his lordship often say," writes 
Rawley, in the Address which precedes the Sylva 
Sylvarum, "that if he should have served the 
glory of his own name, he had been better not to 
have published this Natural History ; but that he 
resolved to prefer the good of men, and that which 
might secure it, before anything that might have 
relation to himself." 

6 



82 PLAY-WRITERS. 

" I hold every man/' says Bacon, in his Preface 
to the Elements of the Common Law, " a debtor to 
his profession ; from which, as men of course do 
seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought 
they of duty to endeavour themselves, by way of 
amends, to be a help and ornament thereunto ;" 
and he adds : — " I have in all points, to the best 
of my understanding and foresight, applied myself 
not to that which might seem most for the osten- 
tation of my own wit and knowledge, but to that 
which may yield most use and profit to the students 
and professors of the laws/' 

Hallam says of the learned men of that day: — 
" They deemed themselves a distinct caste, a priest- 
hood of the same altar, not ashamed of poverty and 
the world's neglect, but content with the praise of 
those whom themselves thought worthy of praise, 
and hoping something more from posterity than 
they obtained from their own age." 

" I account," says Bacon, in his Dedication to 
An Advertisement touching a Holy War, " the use 
that a man should seek of the publishing of his 
own writings before his death, to be but an un- 
timely anticipation of that which is proper to follow 
a man, and not to go along with him." 

Ben Jonson says : — " Poetry, in this latter age, 



PLAY-WRITERS. 83 

hath proved but a mean mistress to such as have 
wholly addicted themselves to her, or given their 
names up to her family. They who have but 
saluted her by-the-by, she hath done much for, 
and advanced in the way of their own profession 
(both the law and the gospel), beyond all they 
could have hoped or done for themselves without 
her favour." 

A learned man * laments — " that scientific and 
literary men have, with us, no recognised social 
position. A man of science, who is perhaps making 
the most wonderful discoveries, is obliged to obtain 
the degree of doctor, and make use of his acade- 
mical title, in order to claim a social position ; and 
a literary man will get called to the bar, at which 
he will never practise, in order to be somebody, 
because, as a writer or a man of taste, he belongs 
to no class, is therefore nobody, and he wants to 
classify himself somewhere." Surely the Cardinal 
does not state the case candidly. Wisdom and 
learning have, with us, their fit and appropriate 
rewards. He that exercises his talents in the 
service of his country — who enrols himself a mem- 
ber of the church, the law, and the state — is ho- 

# Dr. "Wiseman, in his Lecture on the Influence of Words or 
Thought, and on Civilization. 



84 PLAY-WRITERS. 

noured for his devotion, and in most cases rewarded 
in proportion to his merits. The man who uses 
his learning solely for " lucre or profession/' falls 
into quite a different position. 

No self-conferred general name can distinguish 
or give distinction to the literary or scientific man : 
like mixed seed cast on the garden border, when 
it is grown up, some will be strong by drawing 
much nourishment to itself; some prized for the 
beauty of its form or richness of its colour; or other 
its individual excellences ; but none, simply because 
it grew in the garden border. 

When acting and authorship became " a trade 
and calling/' those who had acted gratuitously, and 
the wise and noble who had published their lucu- 
brations from the worthiest motives, looked down 
upon these new men with the utmost contempt. 

Though in this our day we can but rejoice at 
an arrangement which has brought a Macaulay, a 
Bulwer, a Landor, a Carlyle, to be as it were, in 
the pay of the public, we cannot wonder that at 
the commencement of the system, the great men 
of the day should view this new order of writers 
as virtuous women do their fallen sisters, and class 
actors and authors in the category of courtezans. 

Nor can it be denied, that learning lost much of 



PLAY-WRITERS. 85 

dignity, and language, power, by this decadency. 
Independence of the censure of the reader, gives 
freedom to the pen of the writer, and the desire to 
convey the idea, and not cover the page, condenses 
the style. We believe this is the secret of the 
excellence of Elizabethan literature. Certainly 
never since, has so much wisdom been written in 
so few words. Books now are like unsafe banks : 
the bullion is disproportionate to the issue of paper; 
and matter which might be communicated in a 
month, and condensed into a shilling, by a system 
of Circumlocution, is made to maunder through 
twenty months, to produce a pound, 

Our conclusion is, that it would have been a 
disgrace to the noble Bacon to have owned him- 
self the literary hack of the part proprietor of a 
paltry playhouse. 

And here we may note that all the hireling 
writers for the players were men of education, 
members of the universities, and in some instances 
ordained clergymen. Yet in none of their works 
are there so frequent classical allusions as in the 
Shakespeare Plays ; and in these latter, the refer- 
ences have not regard to what we may call school 
classics, but to authors seldom perused but by 
profound scholars. Nor is the classical knowledge 



86 PLAY-WRITERS. 

exhibited of a superficial character ; as Pope ob- 
serves : — " We find him very knowing in the cus- 
toms, rites, and manners of antiquity. In Corio- 
Janus and Julius Caesar, not only the spirit, but 
manners, of the Romans are exactly drawn; and 
still a nicer distinction is shown between the man- 
ners of the Romans in the time of the former, and 
of the latter. No one is more a master of the 
poetical story, or has more frequent allusions to 
the various parts of it : Mr. Waller (who has been 
celebrated for this last particular) has not shown 
more learning this way than Shakespeare. - " 

" Without reviving the debated question of 
Shakespeare's learning," says Hallam,* " I must 
venture to think that he possessed rather more 
acquaintance with the Latin language than many 
believe. The phrases, unintelligible and improper, 
except in the sense of their primitive roots, which 
occur so copiously in his plays, seem to be unac- 
countable on the supposition of absolute ignorance. 
In the Midsummer Night's Dream these are much 
less frequent than in his later dramas; but here 
we find several instances : thus, c things base and 
vile, holding no quantity? for value; rivers, that 
'have overborn their continents? the continente 
* Literature of Europe, part ii. chap. vi. sec. 41. 



PLAY-WRITERS. 87 

riva of Horace ; c compact of imagination '; ''some- 
thing of great constancy/ for consistency; ' sweet 
Pyramus translated there ' ; ' the law of Athens, 
which by no means we may extenuate' I have 
considerable doubts whether any of these expres- 
sions would be found in the contemporary prose 
of Elizabeth/ s reign, which was less overrun with 
pedantry than that of her successor; but, could 
authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it 
is still not very likely that one who did not under- 
stand their proper meaning would have introduced 
them into poetry." 

Hallam adds in a note : — " The celebrated essay 
by Farmer, on the learning of Shakespeare, put an 
end to such notions as we find in Warburton, and 
many of the elder commentators, that he had 
imitated Sophocles, and I know not how many 
Greek authors. Those, indeed, that agree with 
what I have said in a former chapter, as to the 
state of learning under Elizabeth, will not think 
it probable that Shakespeare could have acquired 
any knowledge of Greek. It was not a part of 
such education as he received. The case of Latin 
is different : we know that he was at a grammar- 
school, and could hardly have spent two or three 
years there, without bringing away a certain por- 



88 PLAY-WRITERS. 

tion of the language." We know that there was 
a grammar-school at Stratford-upon-Avon; but, 
with all deference to Mr. Hallam, that William 
Shakespeare was at it, or any other school, is just 
what we do not know. 

In an age of bigotry and religious persecution, 
we find Bacon and Shakespeare expressing a tole~ 
ration of all creeds and religions. We find the 
ethics of the player and the philosopher to be 
identical; and we find them uniting their efforts 
to suppress and exterminate the fashionable, foolish, 
and wicked practice of duels. 

We can imagine the philosopher defining it as 
"a fond and false disguise or puppetry of honour;*" 
the statesman denouncing it as " a desperate evil," 
since " it troubleth peace, it disfurnisheth war, 
it bringeth calamity upon private men, peril upon 
the state, and contempt upon the law." f But we 
may well be surprised, in that age, to find the 
dramatist never once mentioning the private duel 
with approval, but attacking the practice with the 
keenest shafts of his ridicule, and both poet and 

* The charge of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the King's At- 
torney-General, touching duels, upon an information in the Star 
Chamber against Priest and Wright, with the decree of the Star 
Chamber in the same cause. 

t Ibid. 



PLAY -WRITERS. 89 

politician rejoicing in the prospect of its speedy 
extinction, since it cannot but be "that men of 
birth and quality will leave the practice when it 
begins to be vilified, and come so low as to 
barber- surgeons and butchers, and base mechanical 
persons."* 

" There is," says Archbishop "Whateley, " an 
ingenious and philosophical toy called a c thauma- 
trope/ in which two objects painted on opposite 
sides of a card — for instance, a man and a horse, 
a bird and a cage, &c. — are, by a quick rotatory 
motion, made so to impress the eye in combina- 
tion, as to form one picture — of the man on the 
horse's back, the bird in the cage, &c. As soon 
as the card is allowed to remain at rest, the figures 
of course appear as they really are, separate and on 
opposite sides." 

Bacon and Shakespeare we know to be distinct 
individuals, occupying positions as opposite as the 
man and the horse — the bird and the cage ; yet, 
when we come to agitate the question, the poet 
appears so combined with the philosopher, and the 
philosopher with the poet, we cannot but believe 
them to be identical. 

* Ibid. p. 88 ante. 



CHAPTER XL 

ATHENE UM AND OTHER OBJECTORS 
ANSWERED. 

Having candidly communicated and, we trust, 
successfully combatted the main objection urged 
by our adversary, we feel ourself at liberty to quote 
the arguments he has adduced in our behalf. 

" We believe," writes the editor of the Athenceum 
(Sept. 13, 1856), "that a very plausible case could 
be made against the assumed authorship of William 
Shakespeare by any one with knowledge of the 
times. There is, for example, the oue great fact 
to begin with — Shakespeare never claimed the 
plays as his own. His poems he claimed, and his 
sonnets he claimed; and there is an undoubted 
difficulty in understanding how a man who cared 
about Lticrece and Venus and Adonis, could be 
negligent about Hamlet and Othello. Yet Shake- 
speare was unquestionably indifferent about the 
dramas which were played in his name at the 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 91 

theatres and at the court, and died without seeing 
the most remarkable series of intellectual works 
which ever issued from the brain of man, set in 
the custody of type. In the second place, the 
plays contain many lines which allude, or which 
we fancy allude, to passing events — such as Coke's 
brutality on Raleigh's trial, the three thous so 
keenly caricatured in Twelfth Night, and many 
more; and it is natural to infer that these allusions 
came from some one higher in station than a poor 
player — from Bacon, who hated Coke, or from 
Raleigh, who smarted under his insolence. In the 
third place, some of the references of contempo- 
raries to Shakespeare admit of being tortured into 
a charge, that he did not invent the dramas which 
appeared under his name : — for example, when 
Greene says, in his Groat' s-worth of Wit, — l There 
is an upstart crow beautified in our feathers, in his 
own conceit the only Shakescene in a country/ 
what more easy than to say that Shakespeare, in 
the opinion of contemporary dramatists, was only 
a borrower, an adapter of other men's work, like 
some of the salaried poets of our present theatres, 
whose qualifications are described as carpentry and 
French ? In the fourth place, the legal references 
in some of the plays are so numerous and so 



92 OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 

minute, as to suggest, and almost infer, a legal ori- 
gin for these particular dramas. Then, in the fifth 
place, there is the very suspicious fact that Bacon 
nowhere mentions Shakespeare. Bacon was rather 
fond of speaking of his great contemporaries — of 
quoting their wit and recording their sayings. In 
his Apophthegms we find nearly all that is known 
about Raleigh's power of repartee. How came 
such a gatherer of wit, humours, and characters to 
ignore the greatest man living ? Had he a reason 
for his omission? It were idle to assume that 
Bacon failed to see the greatness of Lear and 
Macbeth. There must have been some reason for 
his silence. What reason ? But the most striking 
difficulty, perhaps, lies in the descriptions of foreign 
scenes, particularly of Italian scenes, and of sea- 
life, interwoven with the texts of the plays — de- 
scriptions so numerous and so marvellously accu- 
rate, that it is almost impossible to believe they 
were written by a man who lived in London and 
Stratford, who never left this island, and who saw 
the world only from a stroller's booth. Every 
reader of the plays has felt this difficulty, and 
theories have been formed of imaginary Shake- 
speare travels, in order to account for the minute 
local truth and the prevalence of local colour. It 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 93 

is not easy to conceive the Merchant of Venice as 
coming from the brain of one who had never 
strolled on the Bialto, or sunned himself on the 
slopes of Monte Bello. Without warrant of any 
sort beyond the internal evidence of the play, I\Ir. 
Brown and Mr. Halliwell have boldly adopted the 
theory of an Italian journey; though when and 
how it could have been performed, in the course of 
a life so brief and so busy as Shakespeare's was, 
between his marriage and his retirement from the 
stage, is a mystery not more perplexing than the 

local knowledge it would serve to explain 

Out of a hundred points and arguments like these, 
a theory might be framed — of course, a theory not 
defensible against serious attack — but plausible 
enough on paper. . . . Mr. Smith has scarcely 
made the semblance of a case. His reasoning is 
wholly inferential and hypothetical." 

Our reasoning, we admit, is " wholly inferential 
and hypothetical"; and so is that which attributes 
these productions to William Shakespeare. They 
infer that they were written by him upon the 
strength of the " hypothesis," that all works are 
written by the authors whose names are attached 
to them. They reject Pericles, the Two Kins- 
men, &c, upon the hypothesis that the names of 



94 OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 

superior writers are often attached to works of 
inferior merit. They infer that he wrote the 
superior works, because they can find no evidence 
that he was capable of the inferior; and they 
reject the inferior, upon the hypothesis that he 
that can write well cannot write badly. 

Surely no creed of man's concocting ever re- 
quired so great faith, was more contradictory or 
more incomprehensible. 

which to believe — 
Must be a faith, that reason without miracle 
Should never plant in me. Lear. 

And is it true that Shakespeare "claimed the 
poems and the sonnets " ? Archimedes is reported 
to have said, boasting of the power of the lever, 
" Give me a spot to stand on, and I will move 
the world." So certain critics exclaim, "Grant 
Shakespeare wrote the sonnets, and we will prove 
he wrote the plays." Yet surely the question at 
issue is none other than this : — Was William 
Shakespeare a poet, or was he simply a player and 
part proprietor of a paltry playhouse? If he was a 
poet, it is more than probable that he wrote the 
plays ; if he wrote the plays, it is certain that he 
was a poet. 

We do not intend now critically to consider the 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 95 

sonnets; we hope to do so at some future time; 
but we will briefly state our belief, that many of 
the phases of Bacon's early life might be traced in 
them. 

Bacon owns to having written one sonnet. In 
The Apology of Sir Frances Bacon in certain 
Imputations concerning the late Earl of Essex, he 
writes : — 

u And as sometimes it cometh to pass that men's 
inclinations are opened more in a toy than in a 
serious matter, a little before that time, being 
about the middle of Michaelmas term, her Majesty 
had a purpose to dine at my lodge at Twickenham 
Park; at which time I had, though I profess not to 
be a poet, prepared a sonnet directly tending and 
alluding to draw on her Majesty's reconcilement 

to my Lord . This, though it be, as I said, 

but a toy, yet it showeth plainly in what spirit I 
proceeded." 

Certainly, the allusion to " another's neck," in 
Sonnet 131, might be much more readily construed 
to apply to the Earl of Essex, than the " Hews," in 
Sonnet 20, made to refer to Mr. William Hughes. 

With regard to Tobie Matthew's 

" Postc. — The most prodigious wit that ever I 
knew of my nation, and of this side of the sea, is 
of your lordship's name, though he be known by 



96 OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 

another" — the Athencsum observes : — " Mr. Smith 
does not tell us what he infers from this expres- 
sion of one of the reprobates about the court/' and 
adds, — " We do not care to guess." 

We paraphrase the passage thus : — " The most 
prodigious wit that ever I knew of my nation, and 
of this side of the sea, is of the name of Bacon* 
though he is known by the name of Shakespeare." 

The following is an extract from a letter, without 
date or address, which is to be found in Tobie 
Matthew's collection of letters; like the above 
postscript, it is very mysterious : — 

" I will not promise to return you weight for 
weight, but Measure for Measure; and I must also 
tell you beforehand, that you are not to expect any 
other stuff from me, than fustian and bombast, and 
such wares as that. For there is no venturing in 
richer commodities, and much less upon such as 
are forbidden. Neither, indeed, do we know what is 
forbidden and what not : for both the restraint and 
the penalty are determined by the discretion of the 
officers, and not by the letter of the law. And there 
is a certain judge in the world, who, in the midst 
of his popularity towards the meaner sort of men, 
would fain deprive the better sort of that happiness 
which was generally done in that time, whereof 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 97 

Tacitus wrote when he complained, that — "Memo- 
riam ipsam cum voce perdidissimus. Si in nostra 
potestate esset, tarn oblivisei-quam tacere." 

In the Address to the Reader which precedes this 
collection of letters, Tobie Matthew writes . — 

"It will go near to pose any other nation of 
Europe to muster out in any age four men, who, in 
so many respects, should excel four such as we are 
able to show — Cardinal Wolsey, Sir Thomas More, 
Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis Bacon. 
#■ ■* # * * * * 

* * * The fourth was a creature 

of incomparable abilities of mind, — of a sharp and 
catching apprehension, — large and faithful memory, 
— plentiful and sprouting invention, — deep and 
solid judgment for as much as might concern the 
understanding part : — a man so rare in knowledge, 
of so many several kinds, — indued with the facility 
and felicity of expressing it all, in so elegant, 
significant, — so abundant and yet so choice and 
ravishing a way of words, of metaphors, and 
allusions, — as perhaps the world has not seen since 
it was a world. 

" I know this may seem a great hyperbole and 
strange kind of riotous excess of speech ; but the 
best means of putting me to shame, will be for 

7 



98 OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 

you to place any man of yours, by this of 
mine." 

How was it the name of William Shakespeare — 
a man equal, if not superior to Bacon, in the points 
enumerated— did not occur to Sir Tobie Matthew ? 

Mr. Francis Bacon, writing to this same Mr. 
Tobie Matthew, says : — " Of this, when you were 
here, I showed you some model; at what time, 
methought, you were more willing to hear Julius 
Ccesar, than Queen Elizabeth commended." 

These are but slight matters; but, as Bacon 
observes, "You may see great objects through 
small crannies or levels." 

Tobie Matthew was not the reprobate the Athe- 
naeum represents him. Though the son of an arch- 
bishop, he unfortunately became what we now call 
a " pervert," and was banished the country. Like 

Master Duck, 
Whom Samuel Johnson trod on, 
Had he liv'd here 't'ad been good luck, 
For then we'd had an odd on'. 

Rome's gain was England's loss ; for he would 
doubtless have been to Bacon what Boswell was to 
Johnson. They were very much attached, and 
during the short time he was over here, he was 
continually with Bacon. 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 99 

John Chamberlayn, Esq., writes to Sir Dudley 
Carleton : — 

"London, May 24th, 1617.— Sir Toby Matthew 
is come, and was last night at Mr. Secretary's, 
who dealt earnestly with him to take the oath of 
allegiance. It was lost labour, though he told 
him, without doing it, the King would not endure 
him here long, 

"But, perhaps, he presumes upon the Lord 
Keeper's favour, which indeed is very great now at 
first, if it continues, for he lodgeth him at York 
House, and carries him next week along with him 
to his house at Gorhambury, near St. Aiban's." — 
Again, in October, 1617, he writes, that "Tobie 
Matthew has grown very gay or gaudy in his attire, 
which I should not have expected of his years cr 
judgment/' 

Popery has not much credit in his conversion : 
it commenced by an imposition, and was consum- 
mated by wit and humour. The first impression 
made upon him, he says, arose from the devout 
behaviour of the rustics in the churches abroad, 
and from being convinced of the reality of the lique- 
faction of the blood of St. Januarius at Naples; 
but that his complete conversion was reserved for 
Father Parsons, who gave him to read Mr. William 



100 OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 

Reynolds's Reprehension of Dr. Whitaker, which 
he esteemed the most valuable work on Wit and 
Humour he had ever read. 

Tobie Matthew, says his biographer, affected 
the reputation of a man of universal genius, and 
certainly possessed many accomplishments. 

He was a poet, a painter* {qucere), and a man 
of gallantry. His excellent constitution required 
but few hours' sleep, which he frequently took in 
a great chair ; and rising by break of day, he used 
to dip his head in cold water ; he was then fresh 
as the morning and in spirits to write panegyrics 
on Lady Carlisle, or to pursue whatever else Mas 
started by his volatile fancy. 

Hygeian literature has to deplore the loss of 
his Treatise " On the Benefit of Washing the Head 
every Morning/' His Romish religion seems to 
have been to him as his great chair and morning 
bath. 

Wearied with his little sins, he reposed in her 
bosom; and dipping in the waters of absolution, 
felt himself restored and free — to sin again. 

By the kind permission of Dr. Neligan, we have 
inserted in the Appendix " A Brief Description oi 

* Lord Orford says he painted a portrait of the Infanta, but 
we can only find that he drew it "in words." 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 101 

a curious Manuscript, entitled a true Historical 
Relation of the Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew 
to the Holy Catholic Church, with the Antecedents 
and Consequents thereof." 

The manuscript, could it now be traced, would 
make an interesting volume, worthy of publication 
by the Camden or any other literary society. 

Here we may as well reply to some other of our 
friendly objectors : — "I fear/' says one, "the edge 
of Mr. Smith's argument is turned by the fact that 
there are a greater number of blunders, especially 
geographical and classical errors, in Shakespeare's 
plays than Lord Bacon could have committed even 
in his earliest youth. It is to be observed that in 
all popular knowledge Shakespeare was a master. 
He does not err in his illustrations drawn from 
hunting and hawking and natural phenomena, or 
in such natural history as is learnt from close ob- 
servation of the habits of animals. He only blun- 
ders in things which could only have been derived 
from book learning, in which Bacon excelled." 

The so-called "blunders," we contend, are 
" beauties" in strict accordance with Bacon's ex- 
alted notions of poetry, " which, being not tied to 
the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which 
nature hath severed, and sever that which nature 



102 OBJECTORS ANSWERED, 

hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and 
divorces of things." — Advancement of Learning. 

Certain boldnesses of expression are no more 
indications of ignorance, than Bacon's Christian 
Paradoxes are proofs of profaneness."* Each are 
emanations of a mind superior to such suspicions. 

And our objector surely can never have read 
Bacon's Natural History, or the following observa- 
tions in his contemporary, Osborne's, Advice to a 
Son, part ii. sec. 24 : — 

" And my memory neither doth (nor I believe 
possibly ever can) direct me to an example more 
splendid in this kind, than the Lord Bacon, Earl 
of St. Alban's, who in all companies did appear a 
good proficient, if not a master, in those arts en- 
tertained for the subject of every one's discourse. 
So as I dare maintain, without the least affectation 
of flattery or hyperbole, that his most casual talk 
deserveth to be written, as I have been told, his 

* Lord Campbell says : — " Notwithstanding the stout denial 
that he (Bacon) was the author of the Paradoxes, I cannot 
doubt that the publication is from his pen, and I cannot cha- 
racterise it otherwise than as a profane attempt to ridicule the 
Christian faith." — Lives of the Lord Chancellors, vol. ii. p. 430. 

We have never yet met with a person who, having read " The 
Characters of a Believing Christian, in Paradoxes or seeming 
Contradictions," has concurred in the judgment pronounced by 
the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench. 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 103 

first or foulest copies required no great labour to 
render them competent for the nicest judgments : 
high perfection, attainable only by nse and treating 
with every man in his respective profession, and 
which he was most versed in. 

u So as I have heard him entertain a country 
lord in the proper terms relating to hawks and 
dogs, and at another time out-cant a Loudon chi- 
rurgeon. Thus he did not only learn himself, but 
gratify such as taught him, who looked upon their 
calling as honoured by his notice. Nor did an 
easy falling into arguments (not unjustly taken for 
a blemish in the most) appear less than an orna- 
ment in him ; the ears of his hearers receiving 
more gratification than trouble ; and no less sorry, 
when he came to conclude, than displeased with 
any that did interrupt him. Now, the general 
knowledge he had in all things, husbanded by his 
wit and dignified with so majestical a carriage he 
was known to own, struck such an awful reverence 
in those he questioned, that they durst not conceal 
the most intrinsic part of their mysteries from 
him, for fear of appearing ignorant or saucy. All 
which rendered him no less necessary than ad- 
mirable at the council-table, when in reference to 
impositions, monopolies, &c, the meanest manu- 



104 OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 

factures were an usual argument ; and, as I have 
heard, he did in this baffle the Earl of Middlesex, 
who was born and bred a citizen, &c. Yet without 
any great (if at all) interrupting his abler studies, 
as is not hard to be imagined of a quick apprehen- 
sion, in which he was admirable." 

The Illustrated London News (Oct. 25, 1856) 
thus epitomises our arguments: — " The sum of 
Mr. Smith's argument may be expressed in a few 
words. That these thirty-six plays should have 
been written by the 'Warwickshire lad/ Shake- 
speare, is a wonder; that they should have been 
written by Lord Bacon would have been none." 
After quoting the Relume from Parnassus , Decker 
and Meres, and Coleridge's observations on the 
Poems and Sonnets, the editor proceeds : — " As to 
his (Shakespeare's) general capacity, manifested 
by his conversation with other great minds, Fuller 
bears personal testimony. c Many were the Wit 
Combats/ says he, i between Shakespeare and Ben 
Jonson. I beheld them like a Spanish great galleon 
and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson, like 
the former, was built far higher in learning, solid, 
but slow in his performances. Shakespeare — like 
the latter, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing — - 
could turn with all tides, tack about, and take ad- 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 105 

vantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit 
and invention.'' " 

We pointed out to the editor, that Fuller was 
only eight years old when Shakespeare died, and 
therefore was not likely to have been an eyewit- 
ness of these " Wit Combats." Moreover, the pas- 
sage from "Fuller is misquoted : he did not write, 
" I beheld," but " I behold them "—that is, I 
picture them to my mind. 

It is these picturings and imaginings of circum- 
stances which might have occurred, — and recording 
them as events which did really happen, — that has 
encumbered the life and works of Shakespeare with 
such a mass of error. The keen desire to know 
something has bred an easy willingness to believe 
anything ; and Bacon's observation upon Poetry is 
peculiarly applicable to the life of Shakespeare — 
" because the acts and events of (his) true history 
have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind 
of man," Imagination Cl feigneth acts and events 
greater and more heroical." 

Fuller knew so little of, and inquired so little 
after, Shakespeare, that the entry in his original 
work stands thus : — " He died anno Domine 16 . ," 
Nichols notes : — " It is a little remarkable, that 
Dr. Fuller should not have been able to fill up this 



106 OBJECTORS ANSYTERED. 

blank, which I should have done silently (as I have 
in numberless other instances) ; but that I think 
it right to notice how little was then known of the 
personal history of the sweet Swan of Avon — who 
died April 23, 1616." 

The essay on " Cavilling/' in Blackwood's Edin- 
burgh Review — which we have briefly noticed in our 
Preface — we have read right through, and find our- 
selves neither wiser nor better from the perform- 
ance of this penance. There is nothing to notice, 
and but little to approve, in that prosy pro- 
duction. 

cc As I have only taken upon me to ring a bell 
to call other wits together, which is the meanest 
office/' to repeat Bacon's words,* " it cannot but 
be consonant to my desire, to have that bell heard 
as far as can be." We therefore heartily thank all 
those who have in any way assisted our endeavour. 
It is our theory — not ourselves — we wish to have 
known and considered — content if our little book 

but serves the public mind to wake, 
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake. 

As a recent writer (the Times, March 25, 1857) 
observes : — " When questions are once stirred up, 
the water must be muddy before it is clear again. 

* Letter to Dr. Playfere. 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 107 

This is almost a law of nature. Generally speaking, 
the first result of what is called c thinking over a 
any subject to yourself, is simply to puzzle your- 
self; you are not only not benefited, you are con- 
siderably worse off for your pains. You have left 
the daylight of simple, natural common sense, and 
got into a dark intellectual chamber of your own 
making, in which you go groping about with the 
help of small apertures and passage windows. 
When you emerge out of this gloom, you are 
sometimes indeed the gainer by your experience, 
and regain your common sense, with the addition 
of some clearness and accuracy : but it is not true 
that second thoughts are best. The proverb has 
made a mistake in its arithmetic : it is not second 
thoughts, but third thoughts, that are best. The 
first and last states are good, the middle is bad. 
Every important question should pass through the 
stage of fermenting, after which the irrelevant mat- 
ter settles and goes to the bottom, and the liquor is 
clarified." 

" If it be Truth/' as Bacon writes, 

"Non canimus surdis, respondent omnia sylvse, 

c the voice of nature will consent, whether the voice 
of man do so or no/ " 

Vv r e will conclude this portion of our subject by 



108 OBJECTORS ANSWERED 

quoting a communication from a friendly corre- 
spondent, which is well worthy of attention :— 

"If in your Bacon-Shakespeare Inquiry/' he 
writes, " the purport of the following note has not 
been anticipated, it may perhaps furnish you with 
some hints for further argument. 

"In Shakespeare's Plays there is a dramatic 
series of historical events from the deposition of 
Richard II. to the birth of Elizabeth. But in this 
series there is one curious unaccounted-for hiatus 
— 'The Poet/ as Charles Knight says, 'has not 
chosen to exhibit the establishment of law and 
order in the astute government of Henry VII.'* 

" In Bacon's works there are sundry fragments 
of a History of England. They are but mere hints, 
at once the token that the idea of a history had 
been present in Lord Bacon's mind, and the evi- 
dence that it had not been worked out upon paper 
— at least in this way. But one reign is not a frag- 
ment, it is a history — the History of Henry VII. 
— the missing portion of the dramatic series ; and 
the exhibition of the c establishment of law and 
order/ which a genial editor of Shakespeare sees 
to be wanting to complete the unity of the dramatic 
series, is wrought out in Lord Bacon's book, 

# Pict. Shale. Histories, vol. ii. p. 92. 



OBJECTORS ANSWERED. 109 

" The History of Henry VII., by Bacon, com- 
pletes the series of the Shakespeare Histories from 
Richard II. to Henry VIII. It takes the story 
up, too, from the very place where, in Shakespeare, 
it is dropped. Richard the Third ends with Bos- 
worth Field, with the coronation of Richmond, 
and the order for the decent interment of the 
dead. Bacon's history begins with an ' After/ as 
if it was a continuation. x\nd so it is — a conti- 
nuation of the drama, taking up the history ' Im- 
mediately after the victory/ as Bacon writes in his 
second sentence. Not a word about Henry VII. 
as Earl of Richmond, nothing about the events 
which preceded the Battle of Bosworth — a story 
without a beginning : the beginning of it is found 
in the drama." 



CHAPTER XII. 

POPULAR ERRORS RESPECTING LORD 
SOUTHAMPTON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

The popular opinion appears to be that William 
Shakespeare was the notoriety of his day. Part 
proprietor of the principal playhouse, which was 
the resort of the great and noble, he produced from 
time to time, plays which were at once the wonder 
and admiration of the town. Wise, witty, and 
accomplished, he was the universal favourite — the 
associate of the great and noble — the theme of 
every one's discourse — the subject of every one's 
admiration. 

" From all the accounts of Shakespeare which 
have come down to us/' says Schlegel, "it is clear 
that his contemporaries knew well the treasure 
they possessed in him; and that they felt and 
understood him better than most of those who 
succeeded him. It is extremely probable that the 
poetical fame which in the progress of his career 



LORD SOUTHAMPTON AND SHAKESPEARE. Ill 

he afterwards acquired, greatly contributed to en- 
noble the stage, and to bring the player's profession 
into better repute. That he was not admitted into 
the society of persons of distinction, is altogether 
incredible. Not to mention many others, he found 
a liberal friend and kind patron in the Earl of 
Southampton, the friend of the unfortunate Essex. 
His pieces were not only the delight of the great 
public, but also in great favour at court : the two 
monarchs under w T hose reigns he wrote, were, ac- 
cording to a contemporary, quite ' taken' with him. 
Many were acted at court ; and Elizabeth appears 
herself to have commanded the writing of more 
than one to be acted at her court festivals. King 
James, it is well known, honoured Shakespeare so 
far as to write to him with his own hand/' 

Though probably, as an actor, not superior to the 
court tragedian of the present day — adding to that 
his excellency as an author — we think, by combining 
the court favour now extended to the one and the 
other, we can form some faint conception of the 
honour he enjoyed in the heartier days of the 
Virgin Queen. Every thing theatrical participated, 
we are told, in his exaltation; and the actors of that 
era attained an eminence, personal and professional, 
which has never since been equalled. 



112 LORD SOUTHAMPTON 

Yet surely — if records are to be trusted— the very 
reverse of this was the case. The Blackfriars Thea- 
tre was essentially the People's Playhouse. When 
the new craft of professed players was expelled the 
City, the nobles and the citizens experienced no 
let or hindrance of their enjoyments. The Queen 
in her palace, the noble in his mansion, the lawyer 
at his hall, the citizen at his tavern or inn, still 
partook of their favourite pastimes. The measure 
w r as directed against the populace. The commu- 
nity, as a body, had no desire to interfere with, 
but, on the contrary, were anxious to promote, their 
pleasures and pastimes, in so far as they tended to 
increase their bodily strength and activity ; bear- 
baiting, wrestling, fighting, and pitching the bar, 
they might freely practise : it was the awakening of 
their minds that they dreaded. The Mysteries and 
Moralities, which were to have overawed and con- 
trolled the multitude, had been already turned 
against their originators ; and the little great men 
of that day, like the little great men of every suc- 
ceeding age, dreaded the result to them, if the 
people should be educated. 

Bacon alone stood forward as the advocate of 
education, denouncing as ignorant those that were 
opposed to the diffusion of knowledge. " I think 



AND SHAKESPEARE. 113 

good," says he, " to deliver it from the discredits 
and disgraces which it hath received — all from ig- 
norance, but ignorance severally disguised — appear- 
ing sometimes in the zeal and jealousy of divines ; 
sometimes in the severity and arrogancy of poli- 
ticians ; and sometimes in the errors and imper- 
fections of learned men themselves/' 

The Stage had a powerful opponent in the fana- 
tical religion of the Puritans ; but this was a fluc- 
tuating feeling, acting with greater or less force 
in individuals ; the other pervaded the whole of 
the upper classes, and was expressed and acted upon 
most vigorously by those who, from their proximity, 
considered their province would be soonest invaded. 
Thus the citizens were anxious to annihilate the pro- 
fessed players ; whilst the nobles, seeing less danger 
to themselves, were willing to be more indulgent to 
the people, and content with vindicating their power, 
by imposing rigorous restraints. 

With regard to Shakespeare himself, though we 
greatly admire and reluctantly differ from Schlegel, 
we cannot but think his statement disingenuous 
when he says, " Not to mention many others, he 
found a liberal friend and kind patron in the Earl 
of Southampton." He must have known that the 
Earl of Southampton was the only noble name 

8 



114 LORD SOUTHAMPTON 

with , which that of Shakespeare has ever been 
associated. 

In the present day, when the position of a noble- 
man subjects him to the impertinence of being 
addressed by any one,* it would be preposterous 
thence to presume the existence of any intimacy ; 
and though formerly such freedom might not have 
been allowed, and the permission to dedicate prove 
a degree of knowledge and approval, yet in every 
case, it must be admitted, that a dedication seems to 
intimate inferiority rather than to infer intimacy. 
Few noblemen in that age of stern morality would 
have permitted their name to have been associated 
with a poem on such a subject as the Venus and 
Adonis ; and the fact of Lord Southampton having 
done so, seems to prove him to have been at least 
as renowned in the annals of licentiousness as in 
the arena of literature. In truth, he was no Macae- 
nas, but something of a libertine, and every whit 
a soldier — " sudden and quick in quarrel, w " seek- 
ing the bubble reputation e'en in the cannon's 
mouth." Banished from the court, he haunted the 
playhouse ; addicted to duelling, and anxious to 
avenge his private wrongs, he forsook the service of 

* The author means this as an apology for having addressed 
his letter to a noble earl. 



AND SHAKESPEARE. 115 

his country ; and forgot his duty to his Queen. The 
distinctions of society were then so marked, and 
the distance between a nobleman and an actor, or 
even a dramatic writer, so vast, that the existence 
of a friendly intimacy is not to be unhesitatingly 
believed unless indisputably proved. Most of the 
facts recorded of Shakespeare were found or fabled 
after the Restoration; and the only probability that 
Queen Elizabeth ever saw, much less conversed with 
him, — arises from the circumstance of Heminge's 
company having performed before her, when pro- 
bably he was one of the actors. 

The story of the autograph letter of King James 
seems to be quite apocryphal ; and " from the ac- 
counts which have come down to us/' we should 
conclude that very few of Shakespeare's contempo- 
raries knew anything at all of him. 

" Several Englishmen/' says Schlegel, " have 
given it as their opinion that the players of the first 
epoch were, in all likelihood, greatly superior to 
those of the second — at least with the exception of 
Garrick." 

The quality of the audience is the best criterion 
of the capacity of the actors : if the audience was 
rude and uncultivated, it were hard to believe that 
the actors were cultured and refined. 



116 LORD SOUTHAMPTON 

The witty and worthless writers for the stage 
were wonderfully prolific in their productions. 
Heywood is reported to have written 220 pieces, 
and several others nearly as many. Among the 
numerous advantages arising from the absence of 
scenery and costume, may be accounted the ready 
access of authors to the stage, and the equal com- 
petition to which they were subjected. No consi- 
deration of expense deterred the acceptation of a 
piece. In all ages, managers have been more ready 
to tax the ingenuity of their companies to learn 
new parts, than to tax their own pockets to provide 
new scenery and dresses. In this, too, they act 
wisely \ for how many avoid the theatre, because 
they have " seen the piece before," and how soon 
scenery and dresses pall. 

Amid such a profusion of plays, so much better 
adapted to the taste of the multitude, it is impossi- 
ble to believe that the small number attributed to 
Shakespeare, which were published during his life- 
time, could have made any great sensation. 

The Shakespeare Plays were never more popular 
nor better appreciated, than at the present day ; 
because they are essentially addressed to the read- 
ing public, which was never so extensive as now. 

The collected plays in the folio of 1623, were 



AND SHAKESPEARE. 117 

read and appreciated by the then small portion of 
the community which constituted the reading 
public ; and new editions, in folio, were published 
to supply their libraries and studies, though there 
is no suggestion or tradition that they were ever 
performed for nearly one hundred years after the 
supposed author's decease. 

We have spoken disparagingly of theBlackfriars 
Theatre, its plays and its actors ; but let us not be 
misunderstood. The People's Playhouse is, and 
ever must be, the foundation and support of Eng- 
land's drama. What we contend is, that these 
plays were beyond, and consequently not appre- 
ciated by, the age in which they were written. 

Mysteries, Moralities, and Mummeries had satis- 
fied the people whilst the Bible was a sealed book ; 
but when its truths were made known to them, 
and the great charter of freedom from priestcraft 
announced, that " whatever is not read therein, nor 
may be proved thereby, is not required of any man 
that it should be believed," they then served but 
as subjects for merriment. 

As the contest of creeds had provoked a better 
knowledge of religion, so the contest of govern- 
ments excited inquiry into civil affairs ; and under 
the third of the Stuarts the masses had attained an 



118 LORD SOUTHAMPTON 

intelligence wonderfully in advance of that which 
they possessed under the last of the Tudors. It is 
doubtful whether the closing of the theatre was 
so great a privation to the Londoners as it might 
seem; the excitement of the times might compen- 
sate their loss : the Royalists privately performing 
pasquinades in ridicule of the Puritans, and these 
latter, by attending preaching, supplying the ex- 
citement they had heretofore sought at plays. 
There can be no doubt, however, that this break 
disturbed the natural growth of the British 
Drama. 

Upon the Restoration, the theatre was reopened 
under the managment of Sir William Davenant, 
upon whom extensive privileges were conferred. 
The decorations, costumes, and other arrangements 
of the theatre, were after the most approved foreign 
model. The pieces produced were in accordance 
with the taste of the court, which was most licen- 
tious and profligate. 

As the practice of vice is more consonant to men 
than habits of virtue, and as the extravagant in- 
dulgence in all lawful or unlawful pleasures was 
considered an evidence of loyalty, and in no way a 
disgrace, it is no wonder that public and private 
manners and theatrical entertainments exhibited a 



AND SHAKESPEARE. 119 

grossness it is now hardly possible to credit. Some, 
doubtless, simulated vices they neither adopted nor 
approved, in order to be in the fashion; and many, 
with regret, countenanced what they could not alter, 
yet wished to see cured. 

Thus the theatre continued to exist an exotic 
foreign to the soil of England, cheered by the feeble 
sunshine of the court, and sustained by the fickle 
breath of fashion. But towards the middle of the 
reign of Queen Anne, Betterton appeared at the 
theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and personated the 
characters of Othello, Brutus, and Hotspur. 

It is an elegant passage of Guizot's, where he 
says : — " Imagine a man who has lived for a long 
time in rooms lighted only with wax-candles, chan- 
deliers, or coloured glasses — who has only breathed 
in the faint suffocating atmosphere of drawing- 
rooms — who has seen only the cascades of the opera, 
calico mountains, and garlands of artificial flowers — 
imagine such a man suddenly transported, one 
magnificent July morning, to a region where he 
could breathe the purest air, under the tranquil 
and graceful chestnut-trees which fringe the waters 
of Interlacken, and within view of the majestic 
glaciers of the Oberland, and you will have a pretty 
accurate idea of the moral position of one accus- 



120 LORD SOUTHAMPTON AND SHAKESPEARE. 

toraed to the dramatic representations which for- 
merly occupied our stage, when he unexpectedly 
finds himself witnessing these, so simple, grand, 
and natural beauties." 

But the change from the artificial drama of 
Charles II. to the natural of Shakespeare, or to 
Shakespeare in its natural state, was not so sudden 
or complete. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

TATE, KEMBLE, &c, THEIR KNOW- 
LEDGE OF SHAKESPEARE. 

In the days of the Restoration, there lived a poet 
upon the face of the earth, his name was Nahum 
Tate.* If the number of editions his verses have 
gone through, is a criterion of his excellence, we 
have no hesitation in saying, Nahum Tate is the 
greatest poet England ever produced. 

* Nahum Tate was the son of Dr. Faithful Tate, and was born 
in Dublin in 1652. At the age of sixteen, he was admitted to the 
college there. He succeeded Shadwell as Poet Laureate, and con- 
tinued in that office until his death, which happened on the 12th 
of August, 1715, in the Mint, and was buried in St. George's 
Church. He was remarkable for a downcast look, and had seldom 
much to say for himself, but a free, good-natured, drinking com- 
panion. His dramatic works are — Brutus of Alba, T., 4to, 1678. 
The Loyal General, T., 4to, 1680. King Lear, T., altered from 
Shakespeare, 4to, 1681. Richard LL. ; or, the Sicilian Userper, 
Hist. Play, 4to, 1681 ; printed under the latter title, 4to, 1691. 
The Lngratitude of a Commonwealth ; or, the Fall of Coriolanus, 
4to, 1682. Cuckold 's Haven; or, an Alderman no Conjurer, 
F., 4to, 1685. Duke and no Duke, F., 4to, 1685 ; taken from Sir 
Aston Cockayne's Trappolin. The Island Princess, Tragic Com., 
4to, 1687. Injured Love; or, the Cruel Husband, T., 4to, 1707. 
Dido and JEneas, Op. — Oxberry's Edition of Lear, byN.T. 



122 TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 

We have all sung " to the praise and glory of 
God " and Nahum Tate. Now, Nahum Tate knew 
not Shakespeare, and doubtless would have gone 
to his grave in that happy ignorance ; but Nahum 
Tate had a friend, who, as Bacon says, " redou- 
bleth joys." 

John Boteler, Esq., said unto Nahum Tate — 
a Once upon a time there was a man called Shake- 
speare, who wrote a thing called Lear : a great ge- 
nius such as you are, might make it into a play." 

Now, Nahum Tate prided himself on play- 
writing as much as Psalmody, so he determined to 
do this very thing. When he had done it, he 
wrote a private letter to John Boteler, Esq. In 
those days of heavy postage, a single letter was a 
chargeable affair, and one that contained anything 
so heavy as Nahum Tate's thoughts would have 
been very expensive indeed. It was our habit, 
therefore, in those days to enclose letters in books 
and parcels. We believe it was felony to do so ; 
few things in those days were not felony. A man 
could hardly stir without rendering himself liable 
to the penalty of hanging. However, few of the 
age of forty can own themselves free from this 
fault. Nahum Tate put his private letter into his 
published book, and we have purloined it. We 



TATEj KEMBLE, ETC. 123 

have done, as they ordinarily do at the Post-office— 
taken it because we thought there was something 
in it worth having ; and whatever penalty it may 
have subjected us to, it will at least save the reader 
the penalty of purchasing the book. 
Here the letter is : — 

(( To my esteemed Friend, Thos. Boteler, Esq., 1681. 

" Sir, — You have a natural right to this piece, 
since by your advice I attempted the revival of it 
with alterations. Nothing but the power of your 
persuasion, and my zeal for all the remains ot 
Shakespeare could have wrought one to so bold an 
undertaking. I found that the new modelling of 
this story would force me sometimes on the diffi- 
cult task of making the chiefest persons speak 
something like their characters, on matter whereof 
I had no ground in my author. Lear's real, and 
Edgar's pretended madness, have so much of ex- 
travagant nature (I know not how else to express 
it), as could never have started but from our 
Shakespeare's creating fancy. The images and 
language are so odd and surprising (and yet so 
agreeable and proper), that whilst we grant that 
none but Shakespeare could have formed such 
conceptions, yet we are satisfied that they are the 



124 TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 

only things that ought to be said on such occa- 
sions. I find the whole to answer your account of 
it — a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, 
yet so dazzling in their disorder, that I soon per- 
ceived that I had seized a treasure. // was my 
good fortune to light on one expedient, to rectify 
what was wanting in the regularity and probability 
of the tale, which was to run through the whole, 
a love betivixt Edgar and Cordelia, that never 
changed word with each other in the original. 
This renders Cordelia's indifference, and her father's 
passion, in the first scene probable. It likewise 
gives countenance to Edgar's disguise; making that 
a generous design that was before a poor shift to 
save his life. The distress of the story is evidently 
heightened by it \ and it particularly gave occasion 
to a new scene or two, of more success (perhaps) 
than merit. This method necessarily threw me 
on making the tale conclude in a success to the 
innocent distrest persons, otherwise I should have 
encumbered the stage with dead bodies, which 
conduct makes many tragedies conclude with un- 
seasonable jests. Yet was I rackt with no small 
fears for so bold a change, till I found it well 
received by the audience; and if this will not 
satisfy the reader, I can produce an authority 



TATE, KEMBLE ; ETC. 125 

which questionless will. [He then quotes Mr. 
Dryden's Preface to the Spanish Friar. ~\ ' Neither 
is it so trivial a matter to make a tragedy end 
happily, for it is more difficult to save than to kill. 
The dagger and cup of poison are always in readi- 
ness ; but to bring the action to the last extremity, 
and then by probable means to recover all, will 
require the art and judgement of a writer, and cost 
him many a pang in the performance/ One thing 
more I have to apologize for, which is, that I have 
used less quaintness of expression, even in the 
newest parts of this play. 1 confess 'twas design 
in me partly to comply with my author's style, to 
make the scenes of a piece, and partly to give it 
some resemblance of the times and persons here 
represented. 

" Your obliged friend and humble servant, 

" N. Tate." 

Of course, Nahum Tate struck the Fool out of 
the play. The Poet Laureate knew that fools were 
not fit companions for kings. There have been 
profane persons who have said, that there have 
been kings who, when quite alone, had a fool to 
their company; but Nahum Tate was not a pro- 
fane person ; for, though given to drunkenness and 



126 TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 

debt,— he loved kings, and wrote psalms and 
birthday odes. 

The following is the title of Nahum Tate's pre- 
cious production : — 

THE HISTORY OF KING LEAR. 

ACTED AT THE 

QUEEN'S THEATRE. 

Reviv'd, with Alterations, 

By N. TATE. 

London : 
Printed by H. Hills, for Richd. Wellington, 
at the Lute, in St. Paul's Churchyard; and 
E. Rumbold, at the Post House, Covent 
Garden; and sold by Benj. Lintott, at the 
Cross Keys, in St. Martin's Lane, 1699. 



TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 127 

We have made our extracts from the acting 
copy, because, though we cannot imagine any to 
have read the play through, we must believe many 
to have sat out the performance, 



128 

THE THING CALLED LEAH, PUBLISHED IN 1623. 

Actus Quartus, Scena Prima. 
Enter Edgar. 
Yet better thus, and knowne to be contemn' d, 
Than still contemn'd and flatter'd, to be worst : * 
The lowest, most dejected thing of fortune, 
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear : 
The lamentable change is from the best, 
The worst returnes to laughter. Welcome then, 
Thou unsubstantiall ayre, that I embrace ! 
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst, 
Owes nothing to thy blasts. 

Enter Gloucester and an Old Man. 

But who comes here ? My father poorly led ? 
World, world, O world ! 

But that thy strange mutations make us c hate "^ thee, 
Life would not yield to age. { wait ) 

Old Man. O my good lord, I have bene your tenant, 
And your father's tenant, these fourscore yeares. 

Glo. Away, get the away : good friend, begone ; 
Thy comforts can do me no good at all, 
Thee, they may hurt. 

Old Man. You cannot see your way. 

Glo. I have no way, and therefore want no eyes : 
I stumbled when I saw. Full oft 'tis seene 

* Theobald says this sentiment is so much akin to a passage 
in Ovid, that it seems to be taken directly from it : — 

For tuna miserrima tula est 
Nam timor eventus deterioris abest. 

Epist. ii. lib. 2, ex Ponto. 



129 
NAHUM TATE'S NEW VERSION. . 

Act IV. Scene 1. 

Com. I will have my revenge e'er I depart his house. 
Regan, see here, a plot upon our state ; 

[Gives tier a letter. 
'Tis Grloster's character, who has betray'd 
His double trust, of subject and of host. 

Meg. Then double be our vengeance ; this confirms 
Th' intelligence that we but now receiv'd 
That he hath been this night to seek the King. 
But, who. sir, was the kind discoverer ? 

Corn. Our eagle, quick to spy, and fierce to seize, 
Our trusty Edmund, 

Reg. 'Twas a noble service ; 
O, Cornwall, take him to thy deepest trust, 
And wear him as a jewel at thy heart. 

Edm. Think, sir, how hard a fortune I sustain, 
That makes me thus repent of serving you. 
Oh, that this treason had not been, or I 
Not the discoverer ! 

Corn. Edmund, thou shalt find 
A father in our love, and from this minute 
We call thee Earl of G-loster ; but there yet 
Remains another justice to be done, 
And that's to punish this discarded traitor ; 
But, lest thy tender nature should relent 
At his just sufferings, nor brook the sight, 
We wish thee to withdraw. 

Reg. The grotto, sir, within the lower grove 
Has privacy, to suit a mourner's thought. [Aside to him. 

JEdm. And there I may expect a comforter — 
Ha, madam ? [Aside to her. 

Reg. What may happen, sir, I know not ; 
But 'twas a friend's advice. (Aside to him.) [Exit Edmund. 
Corn. Bring the traitor in. 

9 



130 THE THING CALLED LEAR, PUBLISHED IN 1623. 

Our meanes secure us ; and our meer defects 
Prove our commodities. O deare sonne Edgar, 
The food of thy abused father's wrath ; 
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,* 
I'd say, I had eyes again. 

Old Man. How now ? who 's there ? 

Edg. gods! who is't can say, I am at the worst ? 
I am worse, than e'er I was. 

Old Man. 'lis poore mad Tom. 

Edg. And worse I may be yet : the worst is not, 
So long as we can say, this is the worst. 

Old Man. Fellow, where goest ? 

Glo. Is it a beggar man ? 

Old Man. Madman, and beggar too. 

Glo. He has some reason, else he could not beg. 
I' th' last night's storrae I such a fellow saw ; + 
Which made me think a man, a worme. My sonne, 
Came then into my minde, and yet my minde 
Was then scarce friends with him. 
(I've heard more since.) 
As flies to wanton boyes, are we to th' gods ; 
They kill us for their sport. 

Edg. How should this be ? 
Bad is the trade that must play foole to sorrow, 
Ang'ring itself and others — Bless thee, master. 

Glo. Is that the naked fellow? 

* " I cannot but take notice, that these boldnesses of expres- 
sion are very infrequent in our English Poetry, though familiar 
with the Greeks and Latins." — Theobald. 

t We recollect an old blind organist who always used the ex- 
pression, " I beg pardon, I did not see you at first." 



NAHUM TATE'S NEW VERSION. 131 



'Enter G-lostee. 

Bind fast his arms. 

Glo. What mean your graces ? 
You are my guests ; pray do me no foul play. 

Corn. Bind him [they bind him], I say, hard, harder yet. 

Beg. Now, traitor, thou shalt find 

Corn. Speak, rebel, where hast thou sent the King ? 
Whom, spite of our decree, thou saved' st last night. 

Glo. I'm tied to th' stake, and I must stand the course. 

Reg. Say where and why, thou has conceal'd him, traitor. 

Glo. Because I would not see thy cruel hands 
Tear out his poor old eyes, nor the fierce sister 
Carve his anointed flesh ; but I shall see 
The swift-wing'd vengeance overtake such children. 

Corn. Sees't thou shalt never ; slaves, perform your work. 

[Servants take Gloster out. 
Out with those treacherous eyes ; dispatch, I say. 

Glo. (within). He that will think to live 'till he be old, 
Give me some help — cruel ! oh ye gods ! 

Edw. Hold, hold, my lord, I bar your cruelty ; 
I cannot love your safety, and give way 
To such inhuman practice. 

Corn. Ah, my villain ! 

Edw. I have been your servant from my infancy ; 
But better service have I never done you, 
Than with this boldness. 

Corn. Take thy death, slave. 

[Stabs Edward, and puts up his dagger. 

Edw. Nay, then, revenge, whilst yet my blood is warm ! 

[Draws his sword, runs Cornwall through the body, 
and is carried off by two guards, R. H. Corn- 
wall is supported by servants. 

Reg. Help here — are you not hurt, my lord ? 

Glo. (within). Edmund, enkindle all the sparks of nature 
To quit this horrid act. 



132 THE THING CALLED LEAR, PUBLISHED IN 1623. 

Old Man. Ay, my lord. 

Glo. Gret thee away : If for my sake. 
Thou wilt oretake us hence a mile or twaine 
I' th' way tow'rd Dover, do it for ancient love ; 
And bring some covering for his naked soule, 
Whom I'll intreate to leade me. 

Old Man. Alack, sir, he is mad. 

Glo. 'Tis the time's plague 
(When madmen leade the blind) : 
Do as I bid, or rather do thy pleasure; 
Above the rest, be gone. 

Old Man. I'le bring him the best Parrel that I have, 
Come on 't what will. {Exit. 

Glo. Sirrah, naked fellow. 

Edg. Poor Tom's a-cold ; — I cannot daub it further. 

Glo. Come hither, fellow. 

Edg. And yet I must ; 
Blesse thy sweete eyes, they bleede. 

Glo. Know'st thou the way to Dover ? 

Edg. Both style and gate, horseway, and footpath : poor Tom 
hath been scar'd out of his good wit3. Blesse thee goodman's 
sonne, from the foul fiend. 

Glo. Here, take this purse, thou whom the heav'ns plagues 
Have humbled to all strokes : That I am wretched, 
Makes thee the happier : Heavens deale so still : 
Let the superfluous, and lust-dieted man, 
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see 
Because he do's not feele, feele your powre quickly : 
So distribution should undoo excess, 
And each man have enough. Dost thou know Dover? 

Edg. Ay, master. 

Glo. There is a cliffe whose high and bending head 



NAHUM TATE'S NEW VERSION. 133 

Reg. Out, treacherous villain, 
Thou call'st on him that hates thee ; it was he 
That broach'd thy treason, show'd us thy dispatches ; 
There — read, and save the Cambrian prince a labour, 

[Throws the letter out to him. 

Glo. (within). my folly! 
Then Edgar was abused ; kind gods, forgive me that ! 

Reg. How is 't my lord ? [To Cornwall. 

Corn. Turn out that eyeless villain, let him smell 
His way to Cambray ; throw this slave upon a dunghill. 
Regan, I bleed apace ; give me your arm. 

[Exeunt Regan and Cornwall. 

Enter Edgar in disguise. 

Edg. The lowest and most abject thing of fortune 
Stands still in hope, and is secure from fear. 
The lamentable change is from the best, 
The worst returns to better. Who comes here ? 

[Retires a little up the stage. 

Enter Gloster led by an Old Mak. 

My father poorly led ! deprived of sight, 

The precious stones torn from their bleeding rings ! 

When will the measure of my woes be full ? 

Old Man. O, my good lord, I have been your tenant 
And your father's tenant, these fores core years. 

Glo. Away, get thee away ; good friend, be gone ; 
Thy comforts can do me no good at all ; 
Thee they may hurt. 

Old Man. You cannot see your way. 

Glo. I have no way, and therefore want no eyes ; 
I stumbled when I saw : O dear son Edgar ! 
The food of thy abused father's wrath, 
Might I but live to see thee in my touch, 
I 'd say I had eyes again. 

Edg. Alas ! he 's sensible that I was wronged, 



134 THE THING CALLED LEAR, PUBLISHED IN 1623. 

Looks fearfully in the confined deep : 
Bring me but to the very brimme of it, 
And I'le repayre the misery thou do'st bear, 
With something rich about me : from that place 
I shall no leading neede. 

Edcf. Give me thy arme ; 
Poore Tom shall leade thee. 

Scena Secunda. 
Enter G-oneril, Bastaed, and Steward. 

Gon. Welcome, my lord. I marvell, our mild husband 
Not met us on the way. 
Now, where 's your master ? 

Stew. Madam, within ; but never man so chang'd ; 
I told him of the army that was landed : 
He smil'd at it. I told him you were comming, 
His answer was, the worse. Of Gloster's treachery, 
And of the loyal service of hi3 sonne 
When I informed him, then he call'd me sot ; 
And told me I had turn'd the wrong side out. 
What most he should dislike, seems pleasant to him ; 
What like, offensive. 

Gon. Then shall you go no further. 
It is the cowish terrour of his spirit, 
That dares not undertake : he '11 not feele wrongs 
Which tye him to an answer j our wishes on the way 
May prove effects. Backe, Edmund, to my brother ; 
Hasten his musters, and conduct his powres, 
I must change names at home, and give the distaff 
Into my husband's hands. This trust ie servant 
Shall passe betweene us : e'er long you are like to heare 
(If you dare venture in your owne behalfe) 



NAHUM TATE'S NEW VERSION. 135 

And should I own myself, his tender heart 

Would break betwixt the extremes of grief and joy. [Aside. 

Old Man. How now ? who 's there ? 

Edg. (advancing H. R. of Gloucester). A charity for poor 
Tom. Play fair and defy the foul fiend. 

gods! and must I still pursue this trade, 
Trifling beneath such loads of misery ? 

Old Man. 'Tis poor mad Tom. 

Glo. In the late storm I such a fellow saw, 
Which made me think a man a worm. 
Where is the lunatick ? 

Old Man. Here, my lord. 

Glo. G-et thee now away ; if for my sake 
Thou wilt o'ertake us hence a mile or two, 

1 'th' way to Dover, do 't for ancient love, 
And bring some cov'ring for this naked wretch, 
Whom I '11 intreat to lead me. 

Old Man. Alack, my lord, he 's mad. 

Glo. 'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind ; 
Do as I bid thee. 

Old Man. I '11 bring him the best 'parel that I have, 
Come on 't what will. 

Glo. Sirrah, naked fellow. 

Edg. Poor Tom 's a-cold ; I cannot fool it longer ; [Aside. 
And yet I must. — Bless thy sweet eyes, they bleed ; 
Believe 't, poor Tom ev'n weeps his blind to see 'em. 

Glo. Knows't thou the way to Dover? 

Edg. Both stile and gate, horseway and footpath. 
Poor Tom has been scared out of his good wits. Bless 
Every true man's son from the foul fiend. 

Glo. Here, take this purse ; that I am wretched 
Makes thee the happier. Heav'n deal so still ! 
Thus let the griping usurer's hoard be scatter' d, 
So distribution shall undo excess, 
And each man have enough. Dost thou know Dover? 

Edg. Ay, master. 



136 TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 

A mistresses command. Weare this ; spare speech ; 
Decline your head. This kisse, if it durst speake, 
Would stretch thy spirits up into the ayre : 
Conceive, and fare the well. 

JEdm. Yours in the rankes of death. \_Exit. 

Gon. My most deare Glos'ter. 
Oil the strange difference of man, and man, 
To thee a woman's services are due, 
My foole usurpes my body. 



Then came the days of the Siddons. Shake- 
speare was appreciated then. We have all heard 
our fathers or grandfathers talk of John Philip 
Kemble, and how great he was in Hamlet and 
Coriolanus. Remembering, as we do, the reading 
that was appreciated in the desk, and the oratory 
that was popular in the pulpit, in our boyhood's 
days, we doubt if John Kemble would be greatly 
approved at the present time. John Philip Kem- 
ble was esteemed a great actor, a scholar, and a 
gentleman. 

Young was the great tragedian of our early days. 
Edmund Kean was a fine impersonator of certain 
characters ; but Young's reading, elocution, dress, 
and deportment, was much more finished and 
refined. Charles Kemble, in light comedy, was 
clever ; he dressed as well as the Charles Mathews 



TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 137 

Glo. There is a cliff, whose high and bending head 
Looks dreadfully down on the roaring deep ; 
Bring me but to the very brink of it, 
And I '11 repair the poverty thou bear'st 
With something rich about me. From that place 
I shall no leading need. 

Edg. Give me thy arm ? poor Tom shall guide thee. 

Glo. Soft, for I hear the tread of passengers. 

Enter Kent in his oivn character, and Coedelia, L. H. 



of the present day ; but he could never forget that 
he was a handsome man, and a favourite with the 
ladies. When his daughter Fanny played Bel- 
videra, in Venice Preserved, he took the part of 
Pierre. Pierre had never been such a gay gallant 
soldier before. He played the character well 
though. Young had often performed it ; and 
when he came to the line 

Curse on this weakness, [Weeps. 

the refined and elegant Young used (we can't find 
a better expression) to grub the tear out with his 
knuckle. Try the action, reader, and you v\\\feel 
its appropriateness. Charles Kemble, at the same 
passage, drew out a cambric handkerchief, and 
with an appropriate flourish, like the soldier in the 
song who leant upon his sword, " he wiped away 
a tear." 



138 TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 

The several actions were characteristic of the 
two men. 

We will admit that John Philip Kemhle was a 
great actor, attaching our own meaning to that 
word. The characters of a scholar and a gentle- 
man we cannot award him, at present. He, like 
Nahum Tate, had heard that a man called Shake- 
speare had made a thing called the Tempest, and 
he compiled a play out of it. It is called 

THE TEMPEST; 

OR 

THE ENCHANTED ISLAND, 

WRITTEN 

BY SHAKESPEARE. 

With Additions from Dryden, 

as compiled, by 

J. P. KEMBLE, 

AND FIRST ACTED AT THE 

THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE, 
October 13th, 1789. 

London : — 

Printed for J. Debrett, opposite Burlington 

House, Piccadilly. 

M.DCCLXXXIX. 



TATE, KEMBLE, EtC. 139 

We have extracted a scene or favo : — 

Act V. Scene 1. — A Wood. 
Enter Pbospebo and Mieanda. 

Pros. You beg in vain ; I cannot pardon him, 
He has offended Heaven. 

Mir. Then let Heav'n punish him. 

Pros. It will, by me. 

Mir. Grant him at least some respite for my sake, 

Pros. I by deferring justice should incense 
The Deity against myself and you. 

Mir. Yet I have heard you say the pow'rs abov e 
Are slow in punishing, and should not you 
Resemble them ? 
And can you be his judge and executioner. 

Pros. I cannot force G-onzalo, or my brother, 
Much less the father to destroy the son ; 
It must be then the monster Caliban, 
And he's not here ; but Ariel straight shall fetch him. 

Enter Aeiel. 

Ariel. My potent lord, before thou call'st I come 
To serve thy will. 

Pros. Then, spirit, fetch me here my savage slave. 

Ariel. My lord, it does not need. 

Pros. Art thou then prone to mischief, wilt thou be 
Thyself the executioner ? 

Ariel. Think better of thy airy minister, 
Who, for thy sake, unbidden, this night has flown 
O'er almost all the habitable world. 

Pros. But to what purpose was thy diligence ? 

Ariel. When I was chidden by my mighty lord 
For my neglect of young Hippolito, 
I went to view his body, and soon found 
His soul was but retir'd, not sally' d out : 
Then I collected 



140 TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 

The best of simples underneath the moon, 
The best of balms, and to the wound apply' d 
The healing juice of vulnerary herbs. 
His only danger was his loss of blood ; 
But now he 's wak'd, my lord, and just this hour 
He must be dress' d again, as I have done it. 
Anoint the sword which pierc'd him, with his weapon- 
Salve, and wrap it close from air, till I have time to visit him again. 

Pros. Thou art my faithful servant, 
It shall be done ; be it your task, Miranda, 
Because your sister is not present here ; 
While I go visit your dear Ferdinand, 
From whom I will a while conceal this news, 
That it may be more welcome. 

Mir. I obey you, 
And with a double duty, sir ; for now 
You twice have given me life. [Exit. 

Pros. Now haste, untie the spell, and to me bring 
The wretched Caliban, and his companions. [Exeunt severally. 

Act V. Scene 2. — A Cave. 
Hippolito discovered on a couch, Doeinda by him. 

Dor. How do you find yourself? 

Hip. I 'm somewhat cold, 

Can you not draw me nearer to the sun ? 
I am too weak to walk. 

Dor. My love, I '11 try. 

I thought you never would have walk'd again ; 
They told me you were gone away to heaven ; 
Have you been there ? 

Hip. I know not where I was. 

Dor. I will not leave you till you promise me 
You will not die again. 

Hip. Indeed I will not. 

Dor. You must not go to heaven, unless we go together ; 
But much I wonder what it is to die. 



TATE; KEMBLE; ETC. 141 

Sip. Sure 'tis to dream a sort of breathless sleep, 
When once the soul 's gone out. 

Dor. What is the soul ? 

Sip. A small blue thing that runs about within us. 

Dor. Then I have seen it of a frosty morning 
Bun smoaking from my mouth. 

Sip. But, dear Dorinda, 
What is become of him who fought with me ? 

Dor. Oh ! I can tell you joyful news of him : 
My father means to make him die to-day, 
For what he did to you. 

Sip. That must not be, 
My dear Dorinda, go and beg your father 
He may not die ; it was my fault he hurt me, 
I urg'd him to it first. 

Dor. But if he live, he '11 ne'er leave killing you. 

Hip. My dear, go quickly, lest you come too late. 

[Exit Dorinda. 

John Philip Kemble possibly was a scholar and 
a gentleman — but he did not behave like a gentle- 
man to Shakespeare,, and he was not a Shakesperian 
scholar. 

At the end of the Taming of the Shrew, Johnson 
remarks : — " From this play The Tatler formed a 
story/' vol. iv. No. 131. After narrating the story 
as it appears in the Tatler, he adds : — "It cannot 
but seem strange that Shakespeare should be so 
little known to the author of the Tatler, that he 
shoud suffer the Story to be obtruded upon him, 
or so little known to the publick, that he should 



142 TATE, KEMBLE, ETC. 

hope to make it pass upon his readers as a novel 
narrative of a transaction in Lincolnshire ; yet it 
is apparent that he was deceived, or intended to 
deceive, that he knew not himself whence the story 
was taken, or hoped he might rob so obscure a 
writer without detection." 

We might multiply instances proving how this 
author has been travestied or ignored by those who 
profess to idolise him. But having shown how the 
great poet Tate, the great actor Kemble, and the 
great essayist Steele, treated him, — we may well 
leave it to the reader to conclude how he has been 
used by lesser men. 



CHAPTER XIY. 

AN EPITOME OF WHAT HAS GONE 
BEFORE. 

It would be a new, though certainly a very 
promising feature in Shakesperian inquiry and 
discussion, that the evidence adduced should be 
required to have some little bearing upon the 
point sought to be established. 

Critics have debated the period at which Shake- 
speare left school, without stopping to inquire when 
he went there : the existence of a free school at 
Stratford being abundant proof that he must have 
been a scholar at it ; the existence of a hostelrie at 
Stratford, would be as good proof that he was a 
drunkard. 

The lines, 

There's a divinity doth shape our ends, 
Eough hew them as we will, 

because skeivers are made of rough wood, and shaped 
or pointed at the ends, are assumed to prove that 
Shakespeare's father was a butcher. 



144 



AN EPITOME. 



His journeys to Italy and Scotland are supported 
by evidence of a similar kind. 

And Mr. Charles Butler claims him as an 
eminent Roman Catholic upon negative evidence, 
which would just as well entitle him to be con- 
sidered a Mahometan; therefore it is not for 
editors, critics, and commentators who are versed 
in Shakesperian lore, to object that the evidence is 
not conclusive, or the argument not logical, 

Not being worst, 
Stands in some rank of praise ; 

With such desultory discourse, volumes might 
be filled ; and it would be agreeable to our humour 
so to do, for it is a subject upon which we love to 
dilate. We must, however, put some restriction 
upon ourselves, out of regard to our readers. And 
supposing them to have arrived at this point, we 
will make a little chart of the wilderness which 
they have passed through, and what we wished 
them to learn in their wanderings. 

Had we accompanied them, we should have 
pointed out, that very little indeed is known of the 
History of Shakespeare, and that that little in 
no way connects him with these Plays — that the 
writer of them must have possessed a vast variety 
of talents, such as have been reported to have 



AX EPITOME. 145 

been found in Francis Bacon, and in him alone; that 
the wit and poetry are of a kind which was pecu- 
liarly his— that William Shakespeare of Stratford- 
upon-Avon connected himself with a class which 
had only recently sprung into existence, and which 
were held in the utmost contempt — that he was 
neither eminent as an actor, nor as a writer, during 
his lifetime, nor celebrated as such in the period 
immediately succeeding his death — that there are 
some remarkable coincidences of expression in 
these plays and in the writings of Bacon, and that 
the latter was ever careful to note anything like 
a quotation — that the theatre with which Shake- 
speare was connected was the Public Theatre — 
the lowest place at which dramatic entertainments 
were then represented — that literary labour was 
not at that time ordinarily pursued for pecuniary 
recompense, and the few that followed such an oc- 
cupation were regarded with the utmost contempt 
— that a play was hardly considered a literary 
work, and ranked infinitely below a sonnet, and 
that learned men would as little have prided them- 
selves upon writing one, as upon uttering a boa 
mot — that the first collection of plays that as- 
sumed anything like the appearance of a literary 
work was Ben Jonson ; s splendid folio — that it was 

10 



146 AN EPITOME. 

after this was published that he became acquainted 
with Bacon, and probably with the plays, many of 
which certainly never were published, if in any 
other way ever heard of, before the publication of 
the folio of 1623 — that after that they did not 
become popular as plays, and had a very limited 
circulation — that they were hardly known at the 
time of the Restoration, and so little appreciated, 
that the most ignorant considered themselves able 
to improve them — that they have become generally 
popular through actors delineating characters, and 
delivering speeches, which were either not written, 
or not so appropriated by the poet ; whilst his true 
admirers have ever been, and are still, that, — at 
one time small, but rapidly increasing, — portion of 
the community, the reading public ; these admire 
him for beauties quite independent of the boards, 
and which shine forth, in spite of the ill usage 
which the book has been subject to. 

What with alterations of the text, perplexing 
notes, and injudicious commentaries, we safely 
assert, that with the exception (possibly) of Theo- 
bald's, no edition of the Shakespeare Plays has 
been published, from that of Rowe down to the 
beginning of the present century, that can at all 
be relied on. We say nothing of editions pub- 



AN EPITOME. 147 

lished by living authors; yet we cannot refrain 
from remarking, that in this present year (1857) a 
learned man, not content with weakening passages 
by altering words, has changed the very form of 
the dialogue, and turned the nervous and expres- 
sive lines addressed by Cassius to Casca, amidst 
the thunder and lightning, in the first act of 
Julius Ccesar, — 

You are dull, Caska : 
And those sparkes of life, that should be in a Koman, 
You doe want, or else you use not. 
You looke pale, and gaze, and put on feare, 
And cast yourself in wonder, 
To see the strange impatience of the heavens, — 

into 

You are dull, Casca ; and those sparks of life 
That should be in a Roman you do want, 
Or else you use not. You look pale, and gaze, 
And put on fear, and cast yourself in wonder, 
To see the strange impatience of the heavens : 

and he prides himself upon improving the poetry 
of the Dramatist. A Baden bath towel might 
probably be ironed as smooth as a cambric ker- 
chief, and look all the neater for the process, but 
it would thereby lose both its character and its 
peculiar excellence. 

His Bible and his Shakespeare are books Pro- 
testant Englishmen pride themselves upon possess- 



148 AN EPITOME. 

ing, and profess to peruse. Parts of each are 
periodically brought under notice, and so incor- 
porated in ordinary conversation, that without 
much reading a man must know something of 
them, and without much cunning, " may seem to 
know that he doth not." Yet how few can con- 
scientiously say of either the one or the other, that 
" he has read it right through." How few, whilst 
reading their editions, are aware of the vast dif- 
ference betwixt them and "what he hath left us." 
The Bible was long locked up in an unknown 
tongue, and only known through the commen- 
taries of the priests; the Shakespeare Plays are 
similarly locked up in almost inaccessible libra- 
ries, and similarly made known. The traditions 
of the Church of Rome are hardly less true to the 
former, than is the text of those self-constituted 
priests to the latter. Surely it is time that the 
laity should possess this volume in its integrity. 

And here let me notice a belief that is growing 
very general amongst Shakesperian students, in 
which we are much disposed to concur. It is 
urged on one side, that the folio editions are so 
faulty and full of errors, textual and typographical, 
that it is free to any one to make them just what 
he pleases. It is urged, on the other hand, that 



AN EPITOME. 149 

" as a typographical production, it is better exe- 
cuted than the common run of English popular 
printing of that date/' The opinion that is gain- 
ing ground is, that the several volumes of the 
same edition vary, parts and passages having been 
altered as the printing proceeded. This would be 
an interesting subject to investigate, but would 
involve the necessity of looking out for the most 
incorrect as well as the most perfected copy. But 
certainly something would be gained if Shake- 
sperians could be brought to agree upon any one 
point. 

We may here mention a fact which we have 
remarked, and have not seen noted by any com- 
mentator — that every page in each of the three 
first folio editions contains exactly the same amount 
of matter; — the same word which begins or ends 
the page in the 1623 edition, begins and ends the 
page in the 1632 and 1664 editions : proving that 
they were printed from one author, if not from 
the same types. The 1685 edition is altogether 
different. 

Some things that we have written will doubtless 
be attempted to be disproved, many will be dis- 
torted ; and we shall be told that the sum of the 
whole does not prove that Bacon wrote the plays 



150 AX EPITOME. 

attributed to Shakespeare. We have never said or 
insinuated that we hoped or expected to prove any 
such a thing. All we say is, that for 150 years an 
arduous investigation has been carried on in a 
clean contrary direction. Is it worth while to 
pursue it for 150 days, for 150 hours, in this? 
We repeat what we wrote in an early page : " We 
do but hope to adduce such evidence as may induce 
some active inquiry in this direction." 

And what is the use ? 

Let Bacon answer : — 

" The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making 
or wooing of it ; the knowledge of truth, which is 
the presence of it; the belief of truth, which is 
the enjoying of it — is the sovereign good of 

HUMAN NATURE." 

But what is the practical use ? 

Let Schlegel answer : — " The admiration of 
Shakespeare remained unproductive for dramatic 
poetry. Because he has been so much the object 
of astonishment, as an unapproachable genius, who 
owed everything to nature and nothing to art. 
His success, it is thought, is without example, and 
can never be repeated; nay, it is even forbidden 
to enter into the same region. Had he been 
considered more from an artistic point of view, it 



AN EPITOME. 151 

would have led to an endeavour to understand the 
principles which he followed in his practice, and 
an attempt to master them. A meteor appears, 
disappears, and leaves no trace behind ; the course 
of a heavenly body ought however to be delineated 
by the astronomer, for the sake of investigating 
more accurately the laws of general mechanics/' 

"Whatever is done," says Bacon, "by virtue 
and industry, seems to be done by a kind of habit 
and art, and therefore open to be imitated and fol- 
lowed; whereas felicity is inimitable." 

Hence men have been deterred from attempting, 
by " virtue and industry," to compete with that 
" felicity" which they believe to be "inimitable." 

This we note to be an evil. 

If, however, it should be proved that these plays 
were written by Bacon, it would be inferred that 
this branch of literature does not so much require 
skill and practice in that part of poetry which, as 
Bacon says, " respects words, and is but as a cha- 
racter of stile," as extensive and varied knowledge, 
feeling, reflection, and experience, which form the 
poetic mind. 

And when we consider how ready and powerful 
a medium of communicating and diffusing know- 
ledge the stage is, or might be, if it should appear 



152 AN EPITOME. 

that the statesman, the philosopher, and the man 
of the world, are the best qualified contributors to 
it; how many rich thoughts and wise reflections 
— which perhaps, after encumbering portfolios for 
a time, have been consigned to the waste-paper 
basket, may in future be worked up into a play — 
and thus embalmed for the use and delight of 
future ages. 

/ 
Reader — au revoir. 



153 

Go, little Book — our name is of no note — our 
recommendation will be of no use to you; — do 
good service to us and our publisher, and we will 
reward you with a red coat with gold facings, and 
a portrait of the author. By that time our Govern- 
ment, which loves to reward literary labour, will 
have made us " Baron Bacon," — and we will issue 
a new edition, with a coronet in the corner of each 
leaf — for the American market— where lords are 
lauded. 

Go, little Book ; — weak natures must have re- 
course to cunning : success salves every sin ; we 
would not have you savour of a lie, much less be 
detected in one. 

You must not say that you came out from the 
Egyptian Hall; but you may insinuate that you 
were written by 

A SMITH. 



APPENDIX. 



A BRIEF DESCRIPTION 

OF A CURIOUS MANUSCRIPT 

In the Collection of the Kev. Dr. Neligan, with Extracts. 

THE MANUSCRIPT IS ENTITLED 

A TRUE HISTORICAL!, RELATION 

OP THE CONVERSION OE 

SIR TOBIE MATTHEWS* 

TO THE HOLIE CATHOLIC EAYTH, 

With the Antecedents and Consequents thereof, 
To a deare Friend. 

This highly curions Manuscript consists of three separate 
treatises, and is dated 8th 7ber, 1640.f It is signed by 
Sir Tobie Matthew himself in two places, viz., at the end 
of the history of his conversion, where it also bears the 
name of several witnesses in their own autographs ; and 
again after the treatise called Postliumus, or the Burvivour, 
to which Sir T. Matthew has likewise affixed his seal in 
red wax. In its very interesting pages will be found the 
following : — 

Page 2 — Resolves to spend some years in Italy. 

3 — Prays his parents "to give me leave to spend some 
six months in France till the Parlement in England 
(wherein I had a place) should he recontinued." 
4 — Charged by his father (the then Archbishop of York) 
not to go into Spain or Italy — promises that he 
" would walk within the limit which his father 
prescribed." 

* The name is in the autograph of Sir T. M., who was the eldest son of 
Dr. Tobias Matthew, Archbishop of York a.d. 1606—1627. 
t Although dated 1640 3 it refers to occurrences prior to that period. 



156 



APPENDIX. 



Page 5 — Has "been of opinion that his father thought him 
likelie enough to lay hold upon Catholick religion, 
if he should once find himself in a place where it 
was punctually professed and practised." 

6 — Sir T. Matthew leaves England and goes into Italy. 
12 — Walks with Sir G-eorge Petre and Mr. Robert Cansfield. 

15, 16 — Apparent " liquefaction of the bloud of St. Janua- 
rius," which it is pretended, was before as " hard as 
a pummice-stone," witnessed by the Earl of Suffolk, 
who relates it as true. 

20, 21— On the of October, 1605, falls with his mule 

over a bridge into a river near Naples — " one of 
his spurres broken, but his body being made of a 
softer metal," is miraculously preserved — meets the 
"Bishop of Malta, and divers Cavalliers of that 
Order." 

26 — Arrival at Rome, and introduction to the celebrated 
Jesuit Father Persons, or Parsons, with whom he 
has many conferences. 

34 — Introduction to, and conference with, Cardinal Pinelli 
relative to Queen Mary, Elizabeth, &c. 

64 — Libraries of St. Mark and St. Lawrence, in Florence. 

77 — "Purposed fully to become a Roman Catholic." 

79 — Fancies that he " was not as he then was in Florence, 
but in London and in Prison," and that he " may 
be carried to Tyburne, there to suffer death for the 
confession and Profession of his Fayth." 

80 — Allusion to the " Gunpowder Treason." 

89 — Waits on Padre Lelio Ptolomei. 

93 — " Conducted to the Inquisitour," by whom he is 
" absolved " from what he terms " all his heresies" — 
received into the Church of Rome, in the Annun- 
ciata at Florence. 

96, 97 — Returns to England — visits Canterburie, the 
" Chayre of St. Thomas" (a Becket) — his prayer there. 
100 to 103 — Takes lodgings at the east end of London — 
confers with, and writes to, the celebrated Sir Francis 
Bacon, " changes his lodgings into Fleet Street." 
104 — A visit to Dr. Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury 
— various conferences with him in the Pages fol- 
lowing. 
115 — Description of Bancroft's Library, " the most excel- 
lent possessed by any one single subject in the 
world " — the reason of this. 



APPENDIX. 157 

Page 116 — Bancroft calls for his " Secretary and commanded 
him to make out a warrant for his commitment" 
to prison. 

119, 120 — Extraordinary copious draught of Archbishop 
Bancroft, on the festival of SS. Peter and Paul, 
" of a huge goblet or bowle of about a quart (one 
of those which kings give to archbishops for their 
New Year's Gruift — of what was neither beere, nor 
wine, nor ale, but a caudle, which shewed nutt- 
megs and eggs," — the description of this scene is 
very amusing. 

123 — The Archbishop sends for Sir Christopher Perkins 
to confer with Sir Toby Matthew. 

131 — " His Majestie one day asking the Bishop (Bancroft) 
w r hat became of me," he answered that he held me 
for a kind of obstinate man — " whereupon the 
King was pleased to directe him to put to me the 
oath with opinion, that by no means I would 
refuse it. 

132 — " Mr. Blackwell the arohe-prieste taken" for refusing 
the oath of allegiance, " and put out of his witts" 
by " these subtill men of state" — It appears from 
page 198, that Mr. Blackwell was in the Clinke 
Prison or Precincts. 

143— Sir T. M. committed to the Fleete Prison by the 
Archbishop. 

141, 145 — Visited by Sir Christopher Perkins and Doc- 
tour Morton,* " who was made a bishop after- 
wards," "much abused by his ill reports," Sir 
T. M. speaks to him of the "falsifications with 
which Fa. Persons had charged him with, and so 
he grew to trouble me no more" — "tormented 
much by Doctour Evansham." 

146 — Yisited in the Prison by Sir Maurice Barkley, Sir 
Edwin Sandes, Sir Henry Goodyear, Mr. Richard 
Martin, Mr. John Dunne, &c. 

151 — Yisited by Dr. Albericus Gentilis " the Doctour of 
the Chayre in Oxford for Civil Law." 

158, 189 — Long controversial discussion with Dr. Andrews, 
Bishop of Chichester, occupying several pages. 

168, 169— Dr. Eulke, Ac. 

* Perhaps Dr. Thomas Morton. Bishop of Chester, a.i». 1616. translated to 
Litchfield, 1618— Durham, 1632. 



158 APPENDIX. 

Page 189 — " The Plague was then hott in London, and yet it 
was in no power of mine to get released from that 
prison." 

190 — Sir Francis Bacon intercedes for him. 

193, 194 — Offers to make a present to the Bishop of Salis- 
burie, who declines accepting it without paying the 
full value. 

196 — Sir G-eorge Calvert, Sir John Dackombe, &c. 

204 — Disposes of his estate. 

205— " Delivered out of the Fleete" Prison.— "My Lo. of 
Salisburie kept a continual watch upon me, to do 
me all honour." 

206 — G-oes into France — makes "an acquaintance with 
Mr. Villiers, who grew afterwards to be the King's 
favourite and Duke of Buckingham." 

207, 208 — who " resolved to press King James to permitt 
me to returne into my countrie, to which, after 
great difficulties, his Majestie was content to give 
way," thinking that Vie would take the oath of alle- 
giance, which he still refused, " though with good 
manners" — the King takes offence at his refusal. 

" My Lo. of Bristol had so much good will and so 
much power as to obtain my return home." 

208 — "King James was pleased to put a visible marke of 
particular honour upon me, at the instance of his 
Majestie that now is," viz., Charles I., then Prince 
of Wales. — His conference with the King — " King 
James spoke very graciously to me." 

209 — "L T pon this the honours and favours done me at 
Court, in the eye as it were of my parents, made 
them grow apace in being good to me." — "Being 
once at my father's house, it came out that there 
came by accident, if not by designe, a kinde of lustie 
knott, if it might not rather goefor a little colJedge 
of certaine eminent Clergie-men, Archdeacons, Doc- 
tours, and Chaplains, &c. &c." — with these he enters 
into a Controversial Discussion, which occupies 
several pages, and after expressing his opinions, he 



215 — " It was strange to see how they wrung their hands, 
and their whites of eyes were turned up, and their 
devout sighes were sent abroad to testifie their grief 
that I would utter myself after that manner." 



APPENDIX. 159 

Page 220 — <: My father would ever choose to put some fitt 
booke into ray hand, than to enter into anie express 
discourse, though he told me what a crosse and 
disadvantage it was to him that I should be of that 
religion which I professed, and what a comfort it 
would be if I returned to his ; my custom was to 
excuse myself," &c. 

222 — Thinks his father was inclined to embrace his belief e. 

223 — Death of his father " a matter of much grief to my 
hart." 

223, 232 — Interesting allusion to his " Mother, who was 
much more fervent towards the Puritanicall Scrip- 
ture wav," 

225— His mother "went out of this world, calling for her 
silkes and toys and trinketts, more like an ignorant 
cliilde of foure years old, than like a talking Scrip ■ 
turist of almost foure score." 

226— End of " historicall part," 

232 — Conclusion of first treatise. 

The following is in his own autograph, on page 232 :— 

" I take God humbly to 
wittness yt all this relation 
aforesaid is intirely true. 

" Tobie Matthew, 
" London, ve 8th of 
7ber, 1640." 

Then follows the attestation by witnesses, in a different 

writing, and their autograph signatures : — 

" \Ve heer underwritten amrme that wee have heard Sir Toby 
Matthew declare, and take it upon his soule. that both theRelation 
of his Conversion, which is seen sett down in this booke ; and also 
the following short Discourse, which he calls by the name of 
Posthumus, or the Survivour. are entyrely true, to the best of his 
understanding and memory. Both which are signed by his owne 
hand. He also holds the following Five-and-twenty Considera- 
tions, in order to religion to be very considerable and sweet. 
" Elizabeth Mordaunt. 
" Anne Mordaunt. Elizabeth Petre. 

Greorge "Wintour. Ffran. Petre. 

Edward Gulyard. Edward Young." 

Edward G-uldeforde. 
Thos. James, 



160 APPENDIX. 

Some of the above autographs are fine specimens of the 
writing of the period. 

We are then presented with PostAumus, or the Survivour, 
a treatise which occupies twenty-one pages; and from 
page 22 to the end, page 59, we have the " Five-and-twenty 
Considerations" alluded to, dated 3 641, and apparently 
" signed, James Louth." At the end of PostAumus, or tAe 
Survivour, is the following, in the autograph of Sir Toby 
Matthew, and an impression of his seal in red wax : — 

" Signed by me in London, as in 
ye presence of Almighty G-od, for 
most certainly and intirely 
true ; upon \e 8th day of 7ber. 

1640. 

"Tobie Matthew." 




The seal bears a Lion Rampant in the first and fourth 
quarters, and three Chevrons in the second and third. 

N.B. — These extracts were selected hastily and at ran- 
dom, and convey only a very imperfect idea of this curious 
manuscript, containing, as it does, a great variety of enter- 
taining conferences, with parties well known in the history 
of the time, with several interesting historical facts, anec- 
dotes, &c. &c. 

It is in fine preservation, being as fresh and clean as 
when first written, and was for many years in the posses- 
sion of a highly respectable Eoman Catholic family in Cork, 
being, as is supposed, a sort of heirloom in the family. 



APPENDIX, 161 

The MS. was most probably written by some amanuensis 
or secretary, but whenever the name of Sir T. M. occurs 
it is in his own autograph, except in the above attestation. 
Sir Toby Matthew was the author of some works men- 
tioned by Lowndes, who tells us that iC an account of him 
will be found in Wood's AtJien. Oxon." and that " several 
of his letters are in the Cabala and the Scrinia Sacra." — - 
Vide Lowndes' Bibliographer' s Manual , p. 1238. 

Sir Tobie Matthew was well known in the literary, poli- 
tical, and so-called religious world, and was, as before 
stated, the eldest son of Dr. T. Matthew, Archbishop of 
York. 

Since the foregoing was in type, the following has been 
extracted from a fine copy of Wood's Athena Oxoniensis, 
kindly lent from the valuable and extensive library of the 
Yen. S. M. Kyle, LL.D., Archdeacon of Cork : — 

" Tobie Matthew, the eldest son of Dr. Tobie Matthew, Arch- 
bishop of York, by Frances his wife, daughter of William Barlow, 
some time Bishop of Chichester, was born in Oxon. and matricu- 
lated there in 1589. He became a noted orator and disputant, 
and taking his degree in Arts, travelled into various countries. 
At his return he was taken into the acquaintance of Sir Francis 
Bacon, and between them there passed divers letters, which, if 
collected, might make a pretty volume. At length leaving the 
Church of England by the persuasion of Father Parsons, # the 
Jesuit, he entered into the society, but wh ether he took orders, is 
to me yet uncertain. Afterwards growing famous for his emi- 
nency in politics, he came into England upon invitation, and on 
the 10th Oct., 1623, received the honour of knighthood from his 
Majestic, f for his great zeal in carrying on the Spanish match to 
be had with Prince Charles. At which time not only the E"ing, 
but the chief of his nobility and others at Court, had a high value 
for him — he was also highly valued by the Earl of Strafford, with 

* See his conferences with Father Parsons, page 26, &c. 
f This must be what he meant by saying, page 208 — c: King James was 
pleased to put a visible marke of particular honour upon me." 

11 



162 APPENDIX. 

whom he went info Ireland, that his advice and counsel might 
be used. He was greatly hated by the Presbyterians, and more 
especially by Prynne, who said that he was sent into England by 
Pope Urban VIII., with whom he was in much esteem, to re- 
concile England to the Church of Kome, in which work he, as 
they further say, received a pension * from Cardinal Barberini, 
&c. &c. &c." 

Then follows a list of his works, amongst which was one in 
praise of Lucy Countess of Carlisle, for which Sir John Suckling 
brought him into the poem called the Session or Court of Poets, 
thus : — 

" Toby Matthews what made him there ? 

Was whispering nothing in somebody's ear, 
"When he had the honour to be named in Court, 
But, Sir, you may thank my Lady Carleil for 't." 

He concluded his last day at Gaunt, in Flanders, on the 13th 
Oct., 1655. On his coffin was a leaden plate, with this written 
thereon : " Hie jacet D. Tobias Matthew." 

Wood's Abhen. Oxon. y 1721, vol. ii. pages 194, 195. 

* This he most strenuously denies in page 8, of Posthumous, stating, " I never 
knew anie one in my whole life who lived in obedience under this Crowne, who 
receaved pension or profitt from anie foreign Prince in the world. And let God 
be good to my soul when I shall dye, as he knows I speak nothing hut truth." 



THE END. 



E. Picktoh, Printer, Perry's Place, 29, Oxford Street. 



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